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The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the issues associated with the use of modern energy statistics and information management (ESIM) constructs as information sharing and decision-making mechanisms in the Caribbean community (CARICOM). The study focuses on the strategies required for advancing accepted regional goals of the creation and utilization of ESIM systems in the CARICOM energy sector, a vital precursor to national and regional generation and integration of energy information.

Primary and secondary data from CARICOM countries were analyzed, supported by an assessment methodology which examines the impact of the current state of the environment, and the policy imperatives on the data.

The research findings suggest that the creation and usage of energy statistics and information in the region is minimal. Several issues impact negatively on utilization, including political, visibility, awareness, resource, and cultural factors.

There are several possible alternatives for improving the state of ESIM in the region, and better understanding the peoples of the region, and the approaches to regional integration and development are instructive in deciding on the best approach. The solutions articulated in this paper are intended to achieve more inclusive high-value modalities of operation, optimize skills development and knowledge transfer, and positively impact the decision-making processes at both regional and state levels.

This chapter integrates both structural and symbolic interactionist perspectives used in the study of collective behavior to provide a thorough examination of the campus culture and student–police interactions that precipitated a riot near James Madison University (JMU). While the analysis is anchored by Smelser’s (1971 [1962]) “value-added” model, it also accounts for cultural conditions common on college campuses. Importantly, the dynamics associated with this case may be similar to other riots – at sporting events, at religious processionals, etc. – occurring when authorities disrupt gatherings that have strong cultural resonance among participants. In these cases, attempts at disruption may be seen as an assault on norms strongly associated with a group’s identity. The study also used a unique data source – 39 YouTube videos posted of the riot event – that made it possible to capture the interactive and emergent quality of rioting behavior in real time from multiple vantage points.

We analyze the role of top managers in the process of improving existing products in large established firms. The results of an inductive study reveal two key arguments. First, we find that the process is an “involved” top-down approach, rather than middle-up-down or bottom-up, discussed in previous studies on new product creation. Top managers actively participate throughout the process, taking on four roles: evaluation of product market performance, selection of products for improvement, initiation of the innovation process through delegation to middle managers of the responsibility to organize bottom-level employees to take actions toward product improvement, and monitoring of progress to ensure improvement (ESIM). Top managers become involved as necessary to reduce the resistance of people at the middle and lower levels to change in current routines. Second, we find that in companies that achieve superior product improvement, managers have well-developed professional absorptive capacity and have routinized frequent interactions to evaluate, select, initiate, and monitor. Other characteristics of managers, such as personal absorptive capacity, incentive system, or mandate from above, are common across both high and low performers.

This study seeks to examine what theory of crowd psychology is being applied within public order police training in England and Wales and what accounts of crowds, police strategies and tactics subsequently emerge among officers who undertake this training.

The study uses a multi‐method approach including observations of public order training courses, interviews with students and instructors, and the dissemination of questionnaires.

The analysis suggests that a form of crowd theory associated with the work of Gustave Le Bon has become institutionalised within police training. This in turn is leading to a potentially counter‐productive reliance on the undifferentiated use of force when policing crowds.

The study illustrates that such training outcomes not only are counter to the recent developments in evidence, theory and policy but also undermine the police's ability to develop more efficient and effective approaches to policing crowds.

The study provides a systematic review of public order training which demonstrates how crowd theory is used as a rationale and justification for the use of tactics based on undifferentiated force. It makes suggestions for improving police training so that updates in policy and theory can be translated into operational practice.

Provides a summary of a five‐day workshop held in Istanbul, organized by the International Center for Research on Women. Focuses on the potential for organizing women home‐workers, increasing the visibility of this group and strategies for implementing the International Labour Organisation’s convention on Homework in Turkey.

In this study I examine gender-based earnings differences among the urban self-employed in Turkey. I argue that human capital, as well as prevailing social and institutional structures, contribute to earnings differences. Social and institutional factors considered include women's heavy non-market work burden, and their reduced mobility. I conclude that women's lower earnings are not a result of free and rational choices. Since women are not really expected to choose to concentrate in low-return, labor-intensive tasks, these choices are more likely to be made within the context of uneven economic development and pre-existing gender inequalities.

Past research on collectivist-democratic organizations has attributed their distinctiveness to their socio-political goals and democratic decision-making and largely ignored their work processes. This ethnographic study examines how such organizations resist alienating forms of work even in the face of direct competition with for-profit companies. It focuses on Scopix, a French cooperative sheet-metal factory where the first author spent one year as a shop-floor worker. Cooperators there developed various practices to retain an emancipatory dimension to their work, regularly putting forward “craft ethics” as a counterweight to the sheet-metal industry’s drive to rationalize work processes. Drawing on the sociology of worth, the authors analyze how these practices emerged from the arrangements that workers made between the industrial world on the one side and the domestic and inspired worlds on the other. This study contributes to the literature into two main ways. First, the authors refine the sociology-of-worth framework by conceptualizing the emancipatory dimension of work as the result of ad hoc arrangements between different worlds. Second, the authors highlight the need for the literature on collectivist-democratic organizations to increase its focus on work, introducing the concept of work degeneration as a step in that direction.