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1 – 10 of over 34000Williams was a black feminist pragmatist who contributed to and drew on the ideas and practices of the “Hull-House school of race relations” (HHSRR). This American theory…
Abstract
Williams was a black feminist pragmatist who contributed to and drew on the ideas and practices of the “Hull-House school of race relations” (HHSRR). This American theory unites liberal values and a belief in a rational public with a co-operative, nurturing, and liberating model of the self, the other, and the community, based on the historical ideas and commitments of abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln. Education and democracy are emphasized as significant mechanisms to organize and improve society, especially the relations between black and white people. This school had a distinct institutional influence, structure, and status (Deegan, 2002b). As an African American women who wrote and spoke using feminist pragmatism as it applied to the black experience viewed from her lived standpoint, she developed black feminist pragmatism (Deegan, 2002a). I concentrate here on her writings on biculturalism, especially her (Williams, 1907) essay on the perils of “a White Negro.” She wrote about this anomalous racial category in a number of other pieces that I also analyze here.
Adam J. Vanhove, Tiffany Brutus and Kristin A. Sowden
In recent years, a wide range of psychosocial health interventions have been implemented among military service members and their families. However, there are questions…
Abstract
In recent years, a wide range of psychosocial health interventions have been implemented among military service members and their families. However, there are questions over the evaluative rigor of these interventions. We conducted a systematic review of this literature, rating each relevant study (k = 111) on five evaluative rigor scales (type of control group, approach to participant assignment, outcome quality, number of measurement time points, and follow-up distality). The most frequently coded values on three of the five scales (control group type, participant assignment, and follow-up distality) were those indicating the lowest level of operationally defined rigor. Logistic regression results indicate that the evaluative rigor of intervention studies has largely remained consistent over time, with exceptions indicating that rigor has decreased. Analyses among seven military sub-populations indicate that interventions conducted among soldiers completing basic training, soldiers returning from combat deployment, and combat veterans have had, on average, the greatest evaluative rigor. However, variability in mean scores across evaluative rigor scales within sub-populations highlights the unique methodological hurdles common to different military settings. Recommendations for better standardizing the intervention evaluation process are discussed.
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Colin C. Williams and Sara J. Nadin
Although there is emerging an understanding that many entrepreneurs conduct some or all of their transactions off‐the‐books, there has so far been little attempt to…
Abstract
Purpose
Although there is emerging an understanding that many entrepreneurs conduct some or all of their transactions off‐the‐books, there has so far been little attempt to consider what can and should be done about entrepreneurship in the informal economy. The purpose of this paper is to bridge this gap.
Design/methodology/approach
Following a review of what is known about the prevalence and nature of informal entrepreneurship, this paper evaluates what can and should be done about informal entrepreneurs by analyzing the various policy options and their implications.
Findings
Evaluating the possible policy approaches of doing nothing, eradication, de‐regulation and facilitating formalisation, the finding is that doing nothing leaves intact the existing negative impacts on formal and informal businesses, customers and governments, whilst eradicating informal entrepreneurship results in governments stamping out precisely the entrepreneurship and enterprise culture that they wish to nurture, and de‐regulation results in a levelling down rather than up of working conditions. Only facilitating the formalisation of informal entrepreneurship is found to be a viable policy approach. How this might be achieved is then considered.
Research limitations/implications
More research is required on the hurdles informal entrepreneurs witness when seeking to legitimize their business ventures in different populations before it can be known whether specific policy measures to facilitate formalisation are appropriate.
Practical implications
This paper evaluates various public policy options for tackling informal entrepreneurship and their impacts.
Originality/value
This is one of the first evaluations of the policy options available for tackling informal entrepreneurship.
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Ostrander went to Chicago at the urging of his Williams professor Walter B. Smith who had studied with Frank Knight at Chicago in the early 1920s. He took four courses…
Abstract
Ostrander went to Chicago at the urging of his Williams professor Walter B. Smith who had studied with Frank Knight at Chicago in the early 1920s. He took four courses from Knight: the history of economic thought, economic theory, current tendencies, and economics from an institutional standpoint (his notes taken in these courses have appeared in volume 22B and 23B in this series). At the beginning of the academic year in which he was a graduate student at Chicago, Ostrander’s major professor at Williams, Walter Buckingham Smith, wrote Knight introducing Ostrander to him. Ostrander did not know of this exchange of letters until he read a draft of this piece that I had sent him. The letters are useful in regard to Knight’s legendary pessimism and candor.September 30, 1933Dear Professor Knight:I am writing to tell you that we are sending you a graduate student named Ostrander from Williams. To a considerable extent he is coming to the University of Chicago on my recommendation. I particularly want him to work with you and with Professor Viner and with Professor Douglas. I’ll be interested to see what you do with him. In my opinion he has “promise.”Mr. Ostrander graduated here in 1932 and spent last year in Oxford. He seems to have survived a year at Oxford. Usually a year or two there is pretty hard for an American to get over. Ostrander, contrary to the usual rule, seems to have benefited rather than deteriorated under the direction of his English tutors.Ostrander is much interested in theoretical economics. My hope is that you will be able to do for him what I think you have a unique capacity to do. I hope that you can make him see economic theory not as a body of neat precepts nor as dogmas that one must learn but rather as a critical philosophizing about the categories. Needless to say, I’m not trying to tell you what you should teach your students. I’m merely telling you that I think that Ostrander is an intelligent enough person to understand you if you do in the class room what you used to do when I listened to you. He will understand; and he won’t reproach you if your lectures don’t enable him to get up a good note book.I spent the year before last in Berkeley at the University there and got very well acquainted with your brother M.M. Needless to say, that was one of the most valuable things that happened to me while I was there. I don’t understand why some eastern institution does not make M.M. a good offer and take him away from Berkeley where he is highly esteemed by all but sadly overlooked on pay-day.Do you ever come east? If you do we would be delighted to entertain you and Mrs. Knight here in Williamstown. I would like ever so much to be able to talk with you about economics. If you should come this way you may be sure that we would be very glad to see you.Sincerely yours,[signed] Walter SmithOctober 5, 1933Dear Smith:(I don’t know how I ought to address you, but can’t bring myself to “Professor” you, even though you did me.) I was just going to write you anyway when your letter came in the mail. Your man Ostrander arrived last week, and I had a couple of hours’ talk with him, business being slack on the first day of registration. He impressed me quite favorably. One thing he may have gotten in Oxford or in part from his eastern bringing up (we have a Princeton boy who is fully as bed [sic]) is an extremely deferential air which is embarrassing to me. I very much appreciate your comments, and I am, of course, quite set up at your sending him to us as against Harvard.By all means, any possible opportunity to get together and talk about economics. I am so depressed that it is really serious for my work. I have to fight the conviction that anything in any degree fundamental is impossible, hopeless. On one hand I agree very largely with the “rebels” that rationalistic economics doesn’t amount to a terrible lot, even if it were sound. But on the other hand the little that it does have to say about social relations and problems seems to me as peculiarly fundamental as it is limited in scope. But I suspect that man, in his well known capacity of “political animal,” is an inveterate romanticist, and will never see things in balance or perspective. He will either be a rationalist to the point of romanticism – the “Enlightenment” attitude – or else insist on scorning all fundamentals and transforming the world by wish[ful] thinking or some magic formula.I wonder what you think about current developments. I hope it may partly be due to a run-down physical condition, but actually my feeling is that we are seeing from day to day the “finish” of all we have educated ourselves to call the principal cultural fruits of western civilization. What gripes me is less this fact than the fact that I cannot rationally oppose the abolition of liberty and [the] establishment of tyranny. I feel that the regime of liberty has been a failure, or an experiment with negative results, that it has shown the incapacity of large masses of people to reach any sound conclusion by thinking and discussion – indeed the inevitability of their ending up by selling out to some hero-prophet. If this is the wrong view of events, I wish you would give me any possible help in reaching a view in which my own kind of person and of activity would have any place. I wonder if your failure to write may be based on a feeling similar to this one of my own, which is making it increasingly difficult for me to pretend to try to fan the wi[nd] of culture history into a new direction with a hen feather of words. Indeed, it is making it take an actual moral struggle a good deal of the time to open the door and go into an economics classroom and hold forth.Sincerely,Frank H. KnightNovember 24, 1933Dear FH:Thank you ever so much for your letter about Ostrander. You will be interested to know that Ostrander writes with the very greatest enthusiasm for your course. I am sure that you are doing him a lot of good. Before the year is over I would be interested to have your opinion of him and of his capacities to undertake the arduous job of being an economist. He has seemed promising to me. If this promise seems not to be fulfilled in your opinion, I should feel disposed to tell him so and urge him to resume his plans for going to the Harvard Law School.Your remarks about being depressed over the apparent disillusion of the existing economic order I very much sympathize with. Not only am I troubled about that but I am also very much troubled about the intellectual confusion and the lack of good sportsmanship on the part of the better trained economists these days. President Roosevelt seems to me to be willing to listen to reasonable and constructive suggestions and he has shown an extraordinary disposition to do some social experimenting. In the face of this extraordinary state of affairs it seems to me that the great body of well trained economists has contented themselves with growling quietly to one another and saying nothing in public. From the standpoint of maintaining one’s prestige that is in some ways the wise policy for it enables one to say “I told you so” when things in the world of business fact go wrong. It does seem to me, however, that under the circumstances economists ought to make their position known, that is[,] to point out where they think the existing policies are leading, the important and possibly conflicting goals of different lines of economic policy and certain long run changes in the set up of our legal economic structure. If the economists can’t do that much then it seems to be that they are confessing that their field is in such a state of intellectual confusion that it is practically worthless, or else they are confessing that they are a timid lot of thin-blooded academics who have no right to object if this country is run by the Babbitts.This letter comes to you to find out if there is any possibility of starting a movement or making the opinion of the economists heard. Personally I think we ought to speak out or else publicly admit that the study and teaching of economics is a racket.Sincerely yours,[signed] Walter Smith
Colin Williams and Alvaro Martinez
– The purpose of this paper is to examine whether men and women starting a business use the informal economy and do so to test the viability of their venture.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether men and women starting a business use the informal economy and do so to test the viability of their venture.
Design/methodology/approach
To do this, the results of a survey of 595 small business owners in the UK conducted in August 2012 are reported.
Findings
Of the 22 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women small business owners reporting that they traded informally when starting their business, 66 per cent of the men and 53 per cent of the women assert that a main reason was to test the viability of their business. Hence, just over one in six small businesses started by men and one in 14 started by women (one in eight overall) traded in the informal economy when starting-up in order to test the viability of the business.
Research limitations/implications
A more extensive survey of a wider range of countries is required to further evaluate the tentative findings of this single country small-scale survey.
Practical implications
If tax administrations seek to stamp out informal sector entrepreneurship, one hand of government will be eradicating a significant minority of the entrepreneurship that other hands of government wish to foster. Men and women starting-up informally, however, require different policy approaches to help them formalise their business ventures.
Originality/value
This is the first paper to analyse whether men and women starting a business trade informally at the outset to test its viability.
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Lindsey Bass, Nicholas Alexander Meisel and Christopher B. Williams
Understanding how material jetting process parameters affect material properties can inform design and print orientation when manufacturing end-use components. This study…
Abstract
Purpose
Understanding how material jetting process parameters affect material properties can inform design and print orientation when manufacturing end-use components. This study aims to explore the robustness of material properties in material jetted components to variations in processing environment and build orientation.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors characterized the properties of six different material gradients produced from preset “digital material” mixes of polypropylene-like (VeroWhitePlus) and elastomer-like (TangoBlackPlus) materials. Tensile stress, modulus of elasticity and elongation at break were analyzed for each material printed at three different build orientations. In a separate ten-week study, the authors investigated the effects of aging in different lighting conditions on material properties.
Findings
Specimens fabricated with their longest dimension along the direction of the print head travel (X-axis) tended to have the largest tensile strength, but trends in elastic modulus and elongation at break varied between the rigid and flexible photopolymers. The aging study showed that the ultimate tensile stress of VeroWhitePlus parts increased and the elongation decreased over time. Material properties were not significantly altered by lighting conditions.
Research limitations/implications
Many tensile specimens failed at the neck region, especially for the more elastomeric parts. It is hypothesized that this is due to the material jetting process approximating curves with a pixelated droplet arrangement, instead of curved contour as seen in other additive manufacturing processes. A new tensile specimen design that performs more consistently with elastomer-like materials should be considered. The aging component of this study is focused solely on polypropylene-like (VeroWhitePlus) material; additional research into the effects of aging on multiple composite materials is needed.
Originality/value
The study provides the first known description of orientation effects on the mechanical behavior of photopolymers containing varied concentrations of elastomeric (TangoBlackPlus) material. The aging study presents the first findings on how time affects parts made via material jetting.
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Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank
In the majority (third) world, informal employment has been long viewed as an asset to be harnessed rather than a hindrance to development. The purpose of this paper is to…
Abstract
Purpose
In the majority (third) world, informal employment has been long viewed as an asset to be harnessed rather than a hindrance to development. The purpose of this paper is to show how a similar perspective is starting to be embraced in advanced economies and investigates the implications for public policy of this re‐reading.
Design/methodology/approach
Documents the shifts in how informal employment in western economies is conceptualised in both the academic literature and public policy.
Findings
This paper reveals that the representation of informal employment as an exploitative, low‐paid sweatshop realm is being replaced with a depiction of such work as a hidden enterprise culture that needs to be harnessed. Evaluating how this might be achieved, the need for a shift in public policy away from a deterrence approach and towards an approach that combines deterrents with enabling initiatives to pull this hidden enterprise culture into the formal economy is identified. Specific enabling measures to achieve this in the context of advanced economies are then discussed.
Practical implications
This paper displays how western governments can harness the hidden enterprise culture by setting out specific initiatives to enable its transfer into the formal economy.
Originality/value
This paper provides one of the first attempts to re‐read informal employment as a hidden enterprise culture and to evaluate its implications for public policy.
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