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This exploratory research aims to identify the types of social networks established by German and French expatriates.

The authors use the concepts of social capital and social networks, as well as the societal and cultural approaches, to investigate the way expatriates develop their social networks. The authors' empirical study is based on 40 semi-structured interviews conducted with German and French expatriates.

The authors' findings show that German expatriates mainly establish professional networks, whereas their French counterparts also focus on personal networks. They further indicate that managing social capital lies within the individual responsibility of German expatriates, whereas it is part of higher education institutions in France.

The authors highlight the way German and French expatriates manage their social networks and provide novel insights into the role played by higher education systems and the cultural characteristics of their home country context.

Notes the debate concerning the maintenance of trade union influence in employee participation schemes. Explains why unions have been prevented from significantly affecting the safety representative system in the UK offshore oil and gas industry. It is shown how representative training in particular prevents unions influencing the definition of the representative role. Categorises representatives by their motivation and the source of their role definition noting also the unintended consequences of their role performance. Concludes that structural conditions favour that representative role performance which is oriented to the goals of safety management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether characteristics of French organizations can be found in the Airbus Group, ancient European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) Group, and how these characteristics have evolved over time in comparison to German ones.

This article presents an in-depth case study by using a contextual approach, considering influential factors which are likely to influence the evolution of organizations.

The analysis shows that the Airbus Group reflects characteristics of French organizations: the importance of strategy, the principle of honour, centralization of decision and power, the role of the state in the capital and its influence via professional networks of its elite coming from the Grandes Ecoles. These findings confirm a relative continuity of national peculiarities over time. The recent evolution of the company also highlights the German influence, notably in terms of shares and management positions.

The case study demonstrates that the Airbus Group has become a multinational company where contextual elements and organizational structures regulate intercultural relationships of interests, influence and power.

Five contextual factors are proposed, which allow to understand and structure the peculiarities of French organizations, in comparison to German ones as well as power distribution within the Airbus Group.

Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.

The lack of studies about the response time of emergency medical service during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in a dense city of a developing country has triggered this study to explore the factors contributing to a high response time of ambulance service to reach patients in need. An evaluation of contributing factors to the response time is necessary to guide decision-makers in keeping a high service level of emergency medical service.

This research employed an agent-based modeling approach with input parameters from interviews with emergency medical service staff in Bandung city, Indonesia. The agent-based model is established to evaluate the relevant contribution of the factors to response time reduction using several scenarios.

According to agent-based simulation, four factors contribute to the response time: the process of preparing crew and ambulance during the pandemic, coverage area, traffic density and crew responsiveness. Among these factors, the preparation process during the pandemic and coverage area significantly contributed to the response time, while the traffic density and crew responsiveness were less significant. The preparation process is closely related to the safety procedure in handling patients during the COVID-19 pandemic and normal time. The recommended coverage area for maintaining a low response time is 5 km, equivalent to six local subdistricts.

This study has explored the factors contributing to emergency medical response time. The insignificant contribution of the traffic density showed that citizens, in general, have high awareness and compliance to traffic priority regulation, so crew responsiveness in handling ambulances is an irrelevant factor. This study might have different contributing factors for less dense population areas and focuses on public emergency medical services provided by the local government.

The local government must provide additional funding to cover additional investment for ambulance, crew and administration for the new emergency service deployment point. Exercising an efficient process in ambulance and crew preparation is mandatory for each emergency deployment point.

This study evaluates the contributing factors of emergency medical response time in the pandemic and normal situation by qualitative analysis and agent-based simulation. The performance comparison in terms of medical response time before and after COVID-19 through agent-based simulation is valuable for decision-makers to reduce the impact of COVID-19.

The paper examines the degree of interlocking directorships across the major Eurozone economies. It uses the major stock market indices in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium to identify the top of the corporate elite in each country. For the period of 2005–2008, it studies transnational links between European companies. The paper draws attention to a number of features of these interlocks. Firstly transnational interlocks remain relatively low but secondly they do vary considerably. An important issue here is the degree of bilateral integration which is occurring between some countries within the Eurozone, for example France and Belgium, and the degree to which other countries, most notably, Italy are increasingly disconnected, whilst the two most powerful economies, France and Germany, are very weakly connected. This variability reflects a series of structural divides between big business in the Eurozone that makes it difficult for this corporate elites to be cohesive at the European level.

Most rescue squad members, both in the city and in rural areas, serve on a volunteer (unpaid) basis. It has been widely reported and observed that the number of Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) volunteers is falling in communities across the USA. Meanwhile, internationally, the need for emergency services volunteers is increasing as government support dwindles in these uncertain economic times. The purpose of this paper is to determine how to keep EMT volunteerism at desired levels and provide recommendations for increasing recruitment and retention.

The paper examines what motivates people and why people volunteer in general, beginning with a discussion of citizenship participation and international EMS, then reviewing general and volunteer motivation theories, and finally focusing on volunteer EMT motivation/retention theories in particular. Research studies in two diverse locations (one urban, one rural) are then implemented to survey volunteer EMT motivations and priorities, to find what stimulates EMTs to join and continue to participate in rescue squad operations.

Theoretical explanations and research results are analyzed to determine the implications for both recruitment and retention of volunteer EMTs.

Based on these findings, the remainder of the article is dedicated to the practical application of strategies which are easily implemented and cost‐effective for any volunteer EMT organization, regardless of locale or country of origin. Utilization of these strategies is both timely and relevant, because few communities' operational budgets can absorb the costs of hiring additional professional EMTs.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

Mean breaks in the Franco-German interest rate differential prior to European Monetary Union can have an economic interpretation, namely gains or losses in credibility of the corresponding ERM central exchange rate. A variety of tests are used to detect such breaks, on daily data covering the 1990s. The analysis paints a broadly consistent picture of these breaks and how expectations evolved before EMU. Results suggest that credibility was characterised by gains as well as setbacks; however an effective convergence is found from 1996 onwards, suggesting a major increase of the credibility of the French participation to EMU around that date.

This study examines the variety of cooperative strategies used to organize the international co-production of motion pictures. Motion picture production is a high-goal singularity, project-based industry in which the structure of relationships between companies involved in cooperative strategies is highly visible. Working from existing theories of co-production and drawing on the strategic joint ventures literature, I examine archival data, first for evidence of the strategies predicted by theory, and then for project participation strategies that theory does not account for. I identify four strategies on the basis of the ways that firms participate in international co-productions. A large number of relatively short-lived firms enact strategies of supplying resources and skills to the persistent firms dominate the industry. Two types of persistent firms cooperate with both direct competitors and complementors but pursue different markets, whereas a third type avoids cooperation with peers. The observed strategies constitute a hierarchy of strategic roles, and thus demonstrate the complexity of strategic behavior involved in project-based production.