Search results

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical quantitative evidence concerning small business financing in China and highlight the financing problems faced by small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing their businesses.

A semi‐structured questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from a sample of 60 small businesses in three cities in China. Descriptive methods and the SPSS statistical software package were used to analyse the data and interpret the results.

The data gathered covered current topic in research including the capital structure of SMEs at start‐up, the types and extent of funding shortage, the preference of financial resources as SMEs grow, the significant factors, which help SMEs secure bank loans and the influence of a firm's size, age and the like. The findings generally support financial theories and previous studies about SMEs but also offer the basis for new arguments about financing SMEs in China.

The sample size is relatively small and statistical analysis is relatively straightforward.

The present study will be of interest to policy makers developing new strategies and policies to support the financing of SMEs in China.

The results from this study contribute to the understanding of current problems in financing Chinese small business enterprises. These include findings, which were not presented in other similar studies.

Enabling entrepreneurial creativity is a key aim of UK Government; however, there is a dearth of constructively aligned models of teaching and assessment. This paper aims to introduce design‐based pedagogies and to highlight cognitive approaches that develop innovative mindsets; it seeks to indicate their propensity for adoption in entrepreneurship education.

A literature review plus empirical evidence from pedagogical approaches developed through the extended collaboration of specialists in creative design, financial management and brain‐related occupational therapy inform this paper.

Neuroimaging studies challenge the thesis that learning for creative output is entirely algorithmic; diverse ideas occur when the brain's right cortex has opportunity to bring its findings to the fore, usually via “relaxed cognition”. Design‐based entrepreneurship pedagogies embed these concepts.

The paper offers initial insights into how these understandings can be applied in transdisciplinary entrepreneurship‐education contexts.

Predicable assessment outcomes equal predictable students; which needs more working practices, behaviours and cultural environments that encourage innovation. Any educational environment that excludes these understandings is inherently flawed.

The case study/project “Free time is thinking time” implies that traditional 9‐5 working practices are inappropriate for creative mindsets.

This paper links emerging bodies of evidence; it provides a first response to calls for a more creative enterprise curriculum and offers constructively aligned assessment.

The development of chemical sensors based on nanostructures, such as nanotubes or nanowires, depends on the capability to reproducibly control the processing of the sensor. Alignment and consistent electrical contact of nanostructures on a microsensor platform is challenging. This can be accomplished using labor‐intensive approaches, specialized processing technology, or growth of nanostructures in situ. However, the use of standard microfabrication techniques for fabricating nanostructured microsensors is problematic. The purpose of this paper is to address this challenge using standard photoresist processing combined with dielectrophoresis.

Nanostructures are suspended in photoresist and aligned between opposing sawtooth electrode patterns using an alternating current (AC) electric field (dielectrophoresis). The use of photoresist processing techniques allow the burying of the nanostructures between layers of metal, thus improving the electrical contact of the nanostructures to the microsensor platform.

This approach is demonstrated for both multi‐walled carbon nanotubes and tin oxide nanowires. Preliminary data show the electrical continuity of the sensor structure as well as the response to various gases.

It is concluded that this approach demonstrates a foundation for a new tool for the fabrication of microsensors using nanostructures, and can be expanded towards enabling the combination of common microfabrication techniques with nanostructured sensor development.

This approach is intended to address the significant barriers of deposition control, contact robustness, and simplified processing to realizing the potential of nanotechnology as applied to sensors.

Purpose: Status characteristics theory assumes that the effects of status on performance expectations will be the same for both high and low status actors. However, this may not be true in all situations. Prior work suggests that in some situations, high status actors may ignore new information that should lower their position within a group's power and prestige order (Kalkhoff, Younts, & Troyer, 2011), making them resistant to status loss.

Methods: In a laboratory experiment, I introduced new status information to participants that contradicted their prior status position within a sequence of groups working on the same task.

Findings: Results show new status information that contradicts prior status orders is less influential on the expectations of initially high status actors, supporting the result initially reported by Kalkhoff et al. (2011). Additionally, I show this effect exists for two task-oriented behaviors, resistance to influence and response latency.

Contribution: This experiment suggests a “sticky expectations” effect exists when new status information is introduced to groups with established performance expectations. It also extends earlier research by showing the effect exists for multiple task-oriented behaviors and is not limited to situations involving the transfer of second-order expectations.

Research Implications: This research suggests that high status actors are more resistant to status loss than previously believed. I consider two possible mechanisms for this effect: self-enhancement bias as initially proposed by Kalkhoff et al. (2011) and an effect on collective orientation caused by performance expectations.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive analysis of how sentiments may be a part of, or adjacent to, status generalization. We demonstrate why this problem is so difficult to solve definitively, as many resolutions may exist. Sentiments may present the properties of graded status characteristics but may also be disrupted by processes of the self. Sentiments may have status properties enacted within dyadic interactions. However, sentiments may also be status elements during triadic constellations of actors. Finally, we discuss current research that is underway to provide more empirical evidence to offer confirmation or disconfirmation for some of our proposed models.

We provide a synthesis of literatures, including pieces from group processes, neuroscience, psychology, and network scholarship, to address the relation between sentiment and status processes. Accordingly, this is a conceptual chapter.

We attempt to motivate future research by exploring the many complications of examining these issues.

Understanding how social inequalities may emerge during group interaction allows researchers to address their deleterious effects. Positive sentiments (in other words, “liking”) should bring actors closer together to complete tasks successfully. Ironically, when paired with negative sentiments within task groups, inequalities in group opportunities may result. To address these social inequalities, a thorough understanding of how they develop is necessary, so that efficacious interventions can be adopted.

This deep dive into the relation between sentiment and status processes joins the 25-year quest to understand the issues surrounding this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the application of statistical tools and techniques for quantitative assessment of spiritual capital (SC) based on a questionnaire survey in the organizations which undergo large-scale organizational change projects.

A sample of 65 individuals from three organizations were interviewed. The paper uses the 12 principles of transformation available to spiritual intelligence (referred to as SQ characteristics) to assess SC in a two-phase integrated algorithm of principal component analysis (PCA) and fuzzy clustering.

The paper proposes a two-phase integrated algorithm. In the first phase, PCA is used to reduce the scores of items related to each of SQ characteristics and aggregate them into a single and unique measure. In the second phase, PCA is applied for total SQ quantification. For verification and validation, fuzzy clustering is employed along with PCA to cluster the people in the survey into different classes, which may possess different stocks of SC and rank them based on their level of SQ. The results of PCA are verified and validated by fuzzy clustering revealing the applicability and usefulness of PCA for SC quantification.

The paper is based on individual judgments about their own SQ characteristics hence the results of questionnaire survey may be biased by individual personal characteristics. Future research can apply the proposed algorithm and check for its reliability using other psychometric instruments available in the field.

The paper contributes by filling a gap in the quantitative management tools literature, in which empirical studies on validated multivariate analysis of spirituality have been scarce until now.

Basic science, sometimes called “curiosity-driven research” at the National Science Foundation and other places, starts with a question that somehow stays in the mind, nagging for an answer. Such questions really are “puzzles”; they arise in an intellectual field or context, asking someone to fit pieces to an improving but incomplete picture of the social world. What makes a worthwhile puzzle is a missing part in understanding the picture, or a new piece of knowledge that does not seem to fit among other parts. Sometimes creative theorists can imagine a solution to one of the holes in the puzzle. If they are also empirical scientists, they devise ways to get evidence bearing on their ideas, and some of those ideas survive to give more complete and detailed pictures of the world. This chapter is the story of puzzles and provisional solutions to them, developed by dozens of men and women investigating status processes and status structures, using a coherent perspective, for over half a century.¹

In this paper, I sum up more than 20 years of research and reflection on jealousy. A chronological account of this work is followed by a thematic summary of the findings and some discussion of the relationship between sociology and psychology. Sociological analysis shows that jealousy and other emotions are shaped by social situations, social processes, and social forces. Micro‐sociology reveals that jealousy is learned. Jealousy reflects the life experience of the individual. Meso‐sociology reveals that jealousy is socially useful, indeed, indispensable to social order. Jealousy reflects the institution of marriage and the prohibition of adultery. Macro‐sociology reveals that jealousy is shaped by society and culture. Jealousy reflects the history and the values of a people—and the relevant values vary from time to time and place to place. In the United States, for example, a new and more negative view of jealousy emerged after about 1970 as a result of the sexual revolution and the women's movement.