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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel approach to studying disaster management operations: the emergence of coordination-clusters in long-term rehabilitation projects and innovation dynamics in coordination-clusters.

The problem addressed is examining the coordination dynamics in long-term rehabilitation operations. A mixed methods research approach was adopted where a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques was used for data collection and analysis to study the phenomenon of the coordination evolution in long-term rehabilitation projects.

The results indicate resilience in the behavior of involved actors from different organizations as they re-organize into coordination-clusters and collectively work to overcome the unfolding challenges of long-term rehabilitation projects in areas affected by major disaster.

The results provide some answers to the question of how to map and analyze the phenomenon of coordination-clusters and their consequent coordination dynamics, and thereby steps to redesign the approach to execute long-term rehabilitation projects in places affected by major disasters.

The combination of Actor-network theory and critical incident technique with social network analysis and community detection provides an integrated network-based view of coordination dynamics in long-term recovery operations. Such perspective would broaden the empirical basis for the planning and management of complex disaster management operations.

The results of the research offer a new approach to study coordination dynamics in disaster management operations. The proposed method provides a tool to examine the evolution of processes involved with the recovery phase of a disaster management cycle.

Companies often aspire to create advantages for their businesses through acquisitions. Their participation has increasingly been documented to include different motives for acquirers, while focusing less on the ambitions of acquired parties with the acquisitions. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss gaps and the handling of gaps between acquirers and acquired parties in acquisitions of innovative firms.

In the paper, the authors specifically focus on acquisitions of innovative firms. Four case studies illustrate gaps between the acquirers and the acquired parties.

The authors conclude that gaps may be present from the start as latent gaps, and become activated in integration or as the consequence of non-integration decisions. Gaps between the acquirer and the acquired party may be further manifested in external parties’ reactions to the integration. The handling of gaps emphasizes a transition time and communication about expectations between the acquirer and the acquired party.

The paper contributes to previous research on mergers and acquisitions in general, and acquisitions of innovative firms in particular. Prior literature on acquisitions is scarce on descriptions of gaps or the handling of gaps. Gaps complement ideas on differences in culture between acquirers and acquired parties. It also highlights how acquired parties have as much intention with an acquisition as acquirers.

Whenever we speak of patrimonialism, the reference is to the rule of the pater. Weber theorizes this connection from a genetic perspective. The prototype of patrimonial governance is the household. The patrimonial ruler manages his realm as he would manage his household according to rules of traditional wisdom. This genetic and naturalist model makes patriarchy a constitutive dimension of patrimonial practices. In this conception, patrimony implies the dominion of fathers. Patrimonial officials are bound to be male.³ At least this is what we think. And we are all the more inclined to think so if we assume that the rule of the fathers is a fact of nature grounded in a biological necessity. Etymology comforts this bias: the reference to gender, being inscribed in the term, lends credence to a substantialist interpretation.

This chapter presents a review of the state of the art on the topic of knowledge transfer following post-merger integration (PMI) in international mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and identifies points of agreement and disagreement, recognizes underexplored areas and provides suggestions on how they could be explored in future studies. The chapter points to the limited amount of literature that describes knowledge transfer following international acquisitions, while highlighting it as an emerging field of research. The knowledge transfer literature mainly refers to innovation and innovation capabilities, while areas such as marketing and customer knowledge are vitally absent in the literature. In any international acquisition, such knowledge transfer would be of fundamental importance, given the acquisition motive to reach new markets or customers. Two case studies on the transfer of knowledge about customers following international acquisitions are provided. The case illustrations point to a focus on knowledge transfer on strategic levels in the post-merger integration following international acquisitions, while the operational sales forces’ transfer of knowledge is largely disregarded in practice. Since much of the tacit knowledge about customers is handled on that level, it needs to be recognized and developed. The chapter indicates that raising the awareness of the transfer of knowledge about customers following international acquisitions is important from a practitioner’s as well as a research point of view.

Researchers have shown increased interest in open innovation – that is, the inflow and outflow of ideas, or the collaborative efforts of innovating – while previous research on acquisitions of innovative firms has foremost focused on the inflow only. Open innovation, however, introduces several new challenges related to acquisitions of such firms, not the least related to intellectual property rights and innovative skills that may be distributed among several parties. This paper explores what issues the literature on open innovation and acquisitions deals with related to acquisitions in open innovation environments.

A systematic literature review is conducted to achieve the purpose of the paper. Two main questions are addressed. First, how can acquisitions be understood in relation to open innovation? Second, what does the open innovation literature say on matters of distributed innovations in relation to acquisitions?

The paper concludes that there is a quite limited amount of research concerning itself with open innovation and acquisitions combined. Furthermore, acquisitions are for the most part seen as a means to reach innovation in transaction-based transfers between parties.

With acquisitions of innovative firms, in general, being seen as an important means to reach new ideas, while open innovation is on the rise, the juxtaposing of these phenomena would be of high practical and theoretical relevance to study further.

With an increase in hot days, tropical nights, and heat waves, assumedly more residents of large cities will seek rest and recreation in higher-altitude tourism destinations during the summer. This phenomenon is referred to as the revival of ‘Sommerfrische’ (summer freshness or summer retreat). This chapter examines the impact of climate change on summer tourism in the Alps by urban residents. It scrutinizes the historical perception of the term Sommerfrische, as well as the understanding and perception of this term today, based on an extensive literature review and two focus-group discussions. The findings form the basis for specifying the attributes that can be used to describe a modern form of Sommerfrische. The results indicate that today’s understanding of what Sommerfrische could be and the attributes of Sommerfrische travel are very different from the historical phenomenon. Nowadays, summer excursions and short trips to destinations close to cities are considered to be Sommerfrische as long as they have escape from the heat as a common motive. The results demonstrate the broad interest of urban residents in Sommerfrische and also suggest avenues for further research on the adaptative behavior of town-dwellers in hot summers with respect to the extent of their actual and potential future travel behavior.

Digitally intermediated peer-to-peer exchanges have accelerated in occurrence, and as a consequence, they have introduced an increased pluralism of connotations. Accordingly, this paper aims to assess user perceptions of the interplay between the sharing, access, platform, and community-based economies.

The sharing, access, platform, and community-based economies have been systematically tracked in the social media landscape using Social Media Analytics (SMA). In doing so, a total material of 62,855 publicly posted user-generated content concerning the four respective economies were collected and analyzed.

Even though the sharing economy has been conceptually argued to be interlinked with the access, platform, and community-based economies, the empirical results of the study do not validate this interlinkage. Instead, the results regarding user perceptions in social media show that the sharing, access, platform, and community-based economies manifest as clearly separated.

This paper contributes to existing literature by offering an empirical validation, as well as an in-depth understanding, of the sharing economy's interlinkage to other economies, along with the extent to which the overlaps between these economies manifest in social media.

In contrast to some Second Wave structuralists (e.g., Skocpol, 1979), most contemporary comparative-historical sociologists support the non-reductionist version of methodological individualism (Weber, [1922]1978; Coleman, 1986) suggesting that any complete explanation of social phenomena must include an analysis of individual action as one of its components. However, in part because theoretical training in sociology tends to focus on macro-level causal processes, and in part because it is much easier to get macro-level data about history than good data about the motivations of historical actors, they have usually given less attention to the micro level. As a result, many of the micro-level arguments in comparative historical sociology are incomplete or ad hoc (Kiser & Hechter, 1991). The main exception to this criticism is the growing literature analyzing microfoundations from a cultural/interpretivist perspective. This work often employs complex theoretical arguments oriented to uncovering and decoding the meanings motivating or attached to actions, and sometimes uses rich archival data to illustrate these arguments. At its best, this type of work can allow the reader to see and understand an entirely different historical world from the perspective of participants in it. However, many interpretivists are not interested in doing causal analyses, and most reject the attempt to construct and test causal propositions. For scholars interested in discovering and testing the impact of general causal mechanisms, this is a serious limitation.

Field experience (FE) has long been a crucial component of the process of teacher education. Clearly, a range of stakeholders can affect student-teachers’ achievements in FE. Given the importance of these stakeholders in FE, it may be possible to improve FE practices by clarifying the involvement of different parties in the FE process. Since student-teachers are the major beneficiaries in FE, their voices should not be ignored. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore student-teachers’ perceptions of the roles played by different stakeholders.

In a qualitative research design, 18 student-teachers took part in this study. Content analysis was used to classify and compress the large amount of text provided by the informants into a manageable number of categories to track trends, patterns, frameworks and typologies.

In addition to those of the five major stakeholders of FE (i.e. student-teachers, cooperating teachers, institute supervisors, schools and institutes), this study identified the roles of three other stakeholders (i.e. students, other student-teachers and parents) that had not been widely focused in previous studies.

The present research took the first step to investigate the roles played by different parties in FE from the perspective of student-teachers and offered insights for enhancing student-teachers’ performance in FE.

Uses qualitative data to explore how contemporary religious beliefs mark conceptions of work, particularly with regards to the beliefs of conservative protestant women. Compares liberal protestant women and men as well as conservative men against this group. States that conservative women consider motherhood as their most important work yet they are also most likely to feel “called” to their paid work. Cites that this has important implications for the sociological literature on gender and work. Builds on the original work of Max Weber.