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Conflict understandings of lay people mirror society in miniature. Although lay people and their conflict understandings in society may shape the course of an ongoing conflict, little scholarly attention is so far given to the understandings of everyday discourse in Turkey’s ongoing Kurdish conflict. The present research aims to examine the views of lay Kurds and Turks in two politically polarized cities in Turkey, Mersin and Diyarbakır.

To examine these views, the authors used focus group discussions and open-ended questionnaires with a total of 64 lay people from Mersin and Diyarbakır.

Qualitative content analysis revealed more conflict understandings than presented in the existing academic literature. Furthermore, multiple correspondence analysis suggested that both ethnic identity and the city in which people live are important factors influencing how people perceive the conflict.

The meaning of novel themes, differences and similarities within and between ethnic groups and two cities, and the usefulness of qualitative methods to examine lay people’s viewpoints are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between low-wealth business founders in the USA and external startup funding. Specifically, the authors test whether a founders’ low personal net worth is correlated with a lower probability of acquiring funding from outside sources during the business creation process.

The authors use a double-hurdle Cragg model to jointly estimate: first, the decision to acquire external financing; and second, the amount received. The sample is the US-based Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II). The PSED II tracks business founders attempting to start ventures from 2005 to 2012.

Receipt of outside financing during business formation is largely determined by the business founder’s personal finances (controlling for human capital, venture type and industry, and whether money was sought in the first place). A higher household net worth results in larger amounts of external funding received. Low-wealth business founders, therefore, are less likely to get external funds, and they receive lower amounts when they do. The disparity between low-and high-wealth business founders is more pronounced for formal, monitored sources of external financing such as bank loans.

Because the study eliminates survivor bias by using a nationally representative sample of business founders who are in the venture creation process, the findings apply to both successful business founders and those who disengaged during the business creation process. The authors offer insights into the sources and amounts of external funds acquired by individuals across all levels of wealth. The authors accomplish this by disaggregating business founders into wealth quintiles. The study demonstrates the importance of personal wealth as a factor in acquiring external startup financing compared to human capital, industry, or personal characteristics.

If the ability to acquire external funding is significantly constrained, the quality of the opportunity and the skill of the business founder may be less a determinant of success at creating a new business as prior studies have suggested. Consequently, entrepreneurship (as measured by business formation) as a path toward upward, socioeconomic mobility will be afforded only to those individuals with sufficient financial endowments at the outset.

Unlike prior studies, the data used are not subject to survivor bias or an underrepresentation of self-employment. The statistical model jointly estimates acquisition of financing and the amount received. This resolves selection and censoring problems. Finally, the dependent variables directly measure liquidity constraints in the context of business formation, that is, before a new venture is created. Prior research contexts have typically studied existing businesses, and are therefore not true examinations of conditions affecting business creation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the effectiveness of systems for ensuring cooperation in online transactions is impacted by a positivity bias in the evaluation of the work that is produced. The presence of this bias can reduce the informativeness of the reputation system and negatively impact its ability to ensure quality.

This research combines survey and experimental methods, collecting data from 1,875 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers in five studies designed to investigate the informativeness of the MTurk reputation system.

The findings demonstrate the presence of a positivity bias in evaluations of workers on MTurk, which leaves them undifferentiated, except at the extremity of the reputation system and by status markers.

Because MTurk workers self-select tasks, the findings are limited in that they may only be generalizable to those who are interested in research-related work. Further, the tasks used in this research are largely subjective in nature, which may decrease their sensitivity to differences in quality.

For researchers, the results suggest that requiring 99 per cent approval rates (rather than the previously advised 95 per cent) should be used to identify high-quality workers on MTurk.

The research provides insights into the design and use of reputation systems and demonstrates how design decisions can exacerbate the effect of naturally occurring biases in evaluations to reduce the utility of these systems.

In general, newly resettled refugees have poorer physical and mental health than native-born Swedes. This indicates that the society must make special efforts to enable refugees to attain health that is on a par with the rest of the population. The challenges rest primarily with employees in the public sector. But what resources do professionals need to meet the refugees’ health needs? This paper is about the need to develop strategies for professionals working with diversity and health, with a focus on the establishment of newly resettled refugees in Sweden. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify the needs and obstacles in working with diversity and health for the newly resettled.

The paper is based on focus group interviews with 40 professionals working in three large municipalities and one County Administrative Board, all of whom work with challenges related to migration and health on a daily basis.

The needs expressed by the interviewees are primarily about developing and improving communications. Three important areas of communication were expressed: how information can be transferred from sender to receiver, institutionalization and interactions at different levels.

This paper identifies important needs and obstacles when working with diversity and health in Sweden, with a focus on the establishment of newly resettled refugees. It is an important contribution because refugees in general have poorer physical and mental health than native-born Swedes and strategies to improve their health, therefore, need to be further developed.

This paper aims to assess the impact of infrastructure development on Ghana’s economic growth.

Using data obtained from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the United States’ (US) International Energy Statistics and the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Factbooks from 1980 to 2016, an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework is used to determine the long- and short-run impact of the selected infrastructure stock and quality indices on Ghana’s economic growth.

Findings indicate a statistically significant relationship between infrastructure development and economic growth. Additionally, electricity-generating capacity is identified as the infrastructure stock index that has the greatest positive impact on Ghana’s economic growth. The study reveals that electricity-distribution loss has a significant negative effect over both long- and short-run periods.

Commercial petroleum export from Ghana since 2010 has been a key contributor to economic growth. Although its aggregate effect is included in the annual GDP figures adopted for the study, the authors would have wished to assess its impact on GDP as an independent standard growth determinant. However, because of a lack of available data over this study period, petroleum exports could not be adopted as an independent standard growth determinant. Additionally, an aggregated index of infrastructure stock and quality could not be derived because of the small size of data available. Hence, this study did not assess its impact on Ghana’s economic growth.

The research provides pragmatic guidance to policymakers to focus their efforts on expanding electricity-generating capacity while simultaneously taking steps to curb electricity transmission and distribution losses. These two related actions offer the greatest positive impact on infrastructure development and, as a consequence, Ghana’s economic growth.

This paper represents the first attempt to empirically study the relationship between infrastructure development and Ghana’s economic growth. A key contribution to the existing body of knowledge includes strong evidence of a positive effect of infrastructure development upon Ghana’s economic growth. Results also reveal that the greatest positive impact on economic growth is derived from electricity-generation capacity. However, the study also uncovers a negative, but statistically significant, relationship between road and economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the intelligence and investigatory challenges experienced by law enforcement agencies in discovering the identity of illicit Bitcoin users and the transactions that they perform. This paper proposes solutions to assist law enforcement agencies in piecing together the disparate and complex technical, behavioural and criminological elements that make up cybercriminal offending.

A literature review was conducted to highlight the main law enforcement challenges and discussions and examine current discourse in the areas of anonymity and attribution. The paper also looked at other research and projects that aim to identify illicit transactions involving cryptocurrencies and the darknet.

An optimal solution would be one which has a predictive capability and a machine learning architecture which automatically collects and analyses data from the Bitcoin blockchain and other external data sources and applies search criteria matching, indexing and clustering to identify suspicious behaviours. The implementation of a machine learning architecture would help improve results over time and would be less manpower intensive. Cyber investigators would also receive intelligence in a format and language that they understand and it would allow for intelligence-led and predictive policing rather than reactive policing. The optimal solution would be one which allows for intelligence-led, predictive policing and enables and encourages information sharing between multiple stakeholders from the law enforcement, financial intelligence units, cyber security organisations and fintech industry. This would enable the creation of red flags and behaviour models and the provision of up-to-date intelligence on the threat landscape to form a viable intelligence product for law enforcement agencies so that they can more easily get to the who, what, when and where.

The development of a functional software architecture that, in theory, could be used to detected suspicious illicit transactions on the Bitcoin network.

This study aims to develop the understanding of learning processes related to the new ways of interacting in the enforced digital workplace over time.

A multiple, longitudinal case study of knowledge-based workers in three firms located in Sweden has been conducted from March 2020 to March 2023. In total, 89 interviews with 32 employees in three knowledge-based firms have been collected.

The study shows how the intricate interaction between rules and norms for interaction and work must be renegotiated as well as un- and relearned when the physical work environment no longer frames the work context. Furthermore, technology can be viewed as both an enable and a barrier, that is, technology has enhanced collaboration between organizational members yet also created social difficulties, for example, related to communication and interaction. The study emphasizes that individuals learned through trial and error. That is, they tried behaviors such as translating social interactions" to a digital arena, appraised the outcomes and modified the practices if the outcomes were poor.

The present study does have several limitations. First, it is based on interviews with respondents within three organizations in Sweden. To broaden and deepen the understanding of both organizational and learning, future studies can contribute by studying other contexts as well as using a mixed method approach in other countries.

Results from the study can provide a practical understanding of how the rapid change from working at the office to working from home using digital technologies can be understood and managed.

Contributions include combining interaction order and un- and relearning among organizational employees. This insight is important given that the rapid digital transformation of our society has changed how work is performed and how the future workplace will be both structured and organized.