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1 – 10 of 292Muneta Yokomatsu, Junko Mochizuki, Julian Joseph, Peter Burek and Taher Kahil
The authors present a dynamic macroeconomic model for assessment of disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies under multiple hazards. The model can be used to analyze and compare…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors present a dynamic macroeconomic model for assessment of disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies under multiple hazards. The model can be used to analyze and compare various potential policies in terms of their economic consequences. The decomposition of these effects into multiple benefits helps policy makers and other stakeholders better understand the ex ante and ex-post advantages of DRR investments. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
A dynamic real business cycle model is at the core of this research. In the model multiple natural hazards modeled stochastically cause shocks to the economy. Economic outcomes, most importantly, output can be assessed before and after disasters and under various DRR policies. The decomposition of benefits aims to quantify the concept of triple dividends.
Findings
In case study applications in Tanzania and Zambia, the authors find that investments into physical infrastructure and risk transfer instruments generate a variety of benefits even in the absence of disaster. A land use restriction with planned relocation for example reduces output in the short run but in the long run increases it. Overall, policy effects of various DRR interventions evolve in a nonmonotonic manner and should be evaluated over a long period of time using dynamic simulation.
Originality/value
The novelty of this study lies in the economic quantification of multiple benefits described in the triple dividends literature. This helps comparing ex ante, ex-post and volatility-related economic effects of multiple disasters and related physical and financial DRR investment options. As observed in the case studies, the model can also identify overlooked temporal heterogeneity of co-benefits of DRR investments.
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Joseph C. Ofori-Dankwa and Scott Julian
The purpose of this paper is to present a heuristic model to better understand the inherently paradoxical and concomitant positive and negative organizational outcomes associated…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a heuristic model to better understand the inherently paradoxical and concomitant positive and negative organizational outcomes associated with demographic diversity and value congruence in organizations. It further illustrates the resultant organizational dynamics that result from shifting levels of diversity and value congruence.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts the supply and demand heuristic from the economics discipline and further develops the diversity and similarity curves (DSC) model proposed by Ofori-Dankwa and Julian. Further, this analysis is carried out from both short-run (static) and long-run (dynamic) perspectives.
Findings
This study illustrates how different levels of organizational diversity and value congruence (reflected by diversity and similarity curves respectively) could concurrently result in both positive and negative levels of organizational creativity and competitiveness.
Research limitations/implications
As a heuristic, this study's model is a simplistic representation of the inherently complex set of relationships and outcomes that are associated with paradox in a social setting.
Practical implications
This model has managerial utility for explaining how different levels of diversity in an organizational setting could potentially have different positive and negative outcomes.
Originality/value
This study unpacks the implications of different levels of diversity in an organizational setting and sheds original light on the dynamic nature of virtuous and vicious organizational cycles associated with diversity.
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Micah DelVecchio, Joseph Ofori-Dankwa and Akosua K. Darkwah
Microenterprises in emerging economies are known to operate in turbulent and resource-scarce environments. We test our hypothesis that a more comprehensive “Integrated…
Abstract
Purpose
Microenterprises in emerging economies are known to operate in turbulent and resource-scarce environments. We test our hypothesis that a more comprehensive “Integrated Capital-Based Model” (ICBM) is needed when explaining the performance of microenterprises in such an environment. The model combines traditionally researched financial, human and social capital with more recently emphasized psychological and cognitive capital, providing greater explanatory power than models using only the traditional types of capital.
Design/methodology/approach
We use a pooled linear regression to analyze an existing survey of more than 900 independent business owners who were interviewed seven times between 2008 and 2012 in the Accra and Tema marketplaces in Ghana. We measure the performance of microenterprises using three dependent variables (revenue, profits, and productivity). We contrast the explanatory power of ICBM models against the more traditional models.
Findings
The ICBM has significantly higher levels of explanatory power over the traditional models in examining the performance of these microenterprises. These results highlight the importance of psychological and cognitive capital in emerging economies.
Research limitations/implications
We advocate for a more comprehensive view of capital as shown in our ICBM. However, the data were gathered only in an urban setting, which limits the generalizability to rural parts of emerging economies.
Practical implications
These findings suggest the utility of government and appropriate agencies finding ways to enhance the level of psychological and cognitive capital of microenterprise owners.
Originality/value
This paper's originality stems from hypothesizing and empirically confirming the higher predictive efficacy of ICBM against more traditionally researched capital sources.
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Mary Mackillop, the only Australian to have been declared a “saint” by the Roman Catholic Church, co-founded the Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph, a religious congregation…
Abstract
Purpose
Mary Mackillop, the only Australian to have been declared a “saint” by the Roman Catholic Church, co-founded the Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph, a religious congregation established primarily to educate the poor. Prior to this, she taught at a Common School in Portland. While she was there, the headmaster was dismissed. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which the narrative accounts of the dismissal, as provided in the biographies of Mary, are supported by the documentary evidence. Contemporary records of the Board of Education indicate that Mary played a more active role in the dismissal than that suggested by her biographers.
Design/methodology/approach
Documentary evidence, particularly the records of the Board of Education, has been used to challenge the biographical accounts of Mary Mackillop’s involvement in an incident that occurred while she was a teacher at the Portland Common School.
Findings
It appears that the biographers, by omitting to consider the evidence available in the records of the Board of Education, have down-played Mary Mackillop’s involvement in the events that led to the dismissal of the head teacher at Portland.
Originality/value
This paper uses documentary evidence to challenge the account of the Portand incident, as provided in the biographies of Mary Mackillop.
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BRENT POPPENHAGEN, JULIAN MINGUS and JOSEPH ROGUS
Differences among elementary, junior high, and senior high school principals' perceptions of their administrative task competence; involvement with central office; autonomy; job…
Abstract
Differences among elementary, junior high, and senior high school principals' perceptions of their administrative task competence; involvement with central office; autonomy; job satisfaction; and length of work week were investigated in relation to social forces confronting the principalship and characteristics of traditional principal preparation programs. Questionnaires mailed to a random sample of 450 principals in rural, urban, and suburban districts yielded a 64 per cent return. All principals perceived themselves competent in administrative tasks. However, suburban principals were more involved with central office and experienced greater autonomy than urban principals. Urban principals worked similar hours and were uniformly satisfied unlike suburban principals who varied significantly in level of satisfaction and hours worked. Revisions in principal preparation programs were mandated.
I am honored to present Volume 22 of Political Power and Social Theory (PPST). This volume is a landmark, in that it is among the first volumes of PPST to be dedicated to a single…
Abstract
I am honored to present Volume 22 of Political Power and Social Theory (PPST). This volume is a landmark, in that it is among the first volumes of PPST to be dedicated to a single topic. With the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election in sight, this special volume on the meaning of Barack Obama's presidency from a critical social science perspective is especially timely. For the first part of the volume, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Louise Seamster have put together a diverse collection of essays on the politics of race in the age of Obama. For the second part (the Scholarly Controversy section familiar to PPST readers), Philip S. Gorski offers provocative reflections on Obama and civil religion in the United States, with critical commentary from Joseph Gerteis, Andrew R. Murphy, and Michael Young and Christopher Pieper.
Julian Fares, Sami Sadaka and Jihad El Hokayem
During disturbances and unprecedented events, firms are required to be resilient to confront crises, recover from losses, and even capitalize on new opportunities. The aim of this…
Abstract
Purpose
During disturbances and unprecedented events, firms are required to be resilient to confront crises, recover from losses, and even capitalize on new opportunities. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to examine how different types of capabilities (routine, dynamic or ad hoc) steer an entrepreneurial firm into ecological, engineering and evolutionary resilience and (2) to identify strategic activities that are deployed by firms with different capabilities to achieve resilience.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were gathered using structured qualitative interviews with 26 entrepreneurial resilient firms that managed to survive a multitude of coinciding crises.
Findings
The findings show that each type of capability enhances the ability to achieve a specific resilience outcome: ad hoc capability for partial engineering resilience, routine capability for ecological resilience and dynamic capability for evolutionary resilience. Furthermore, ad hoc capabilities are shown to be favored when firms' losses are severe. In contrast, routine and dynamic capabilities are preferred when losses are mild. The most significant capability deployment activities related to building resilience are corporate strategic changes, global export strategy, cost reduction, stakeholder support, positive mindset, fund raising, network building, product development, efficiency improvement and restructuring. These activities are segregated based on capability and resilience types.
Practical implications
Practitioners are encouraged to cast off limiting assumptions and beliefs that firms are conditioned to fail when faced with unprecedented crises. This study provides an integrative portfolio of capabilities and activities as a toolbox that can be used by different entrepreneurs and policy makers to achieve resilience and better performance.
Originality/value
The paper undertakes a first of its kind empirical examination of the association between capabilities and resilience. The context is unique as it involves a multitude of coinciding crises including Covid-19 pandemic, city explosion, economic collapse, political instability and a severe banking crisis.
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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balanceeconomics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary toman′s finding the good life and society enduring…
Abstract
A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.
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Anthropology was a late‐comer to the Caribbean and only after World War II did the study of Caribbean culture and societies become less exceptional. Early in this century when…
Abstract
Anthropology was a late‐comer to the Caribbean and only after World War II did the study of Caribbean culture and societies become less exceptional. Early in this century when anthropology was first making itself over as an ethnographic science, anthropologists concentrated on tribal peoples. For most of the post‐Columbian era, the Caribbean region, with a few minor exceptions, was without indigenous tribal societies. Even after anthropology turned its attention to the study of peasantries, Caribbean peasantries were ignored in favor of more stable and tradition‐oriented peasant societies in other parts of Latin America. When anthropologists began to study Caribbean peoples in a more serious and systematic fashion, they found that they had to develop new concepts to explain the variation, flexibility, and heterogeneity that characterized regional culture. These concepts have had a significant impact on social and cultural theory and on the broader contemporary dialogue about cultural diversity and multiculturalism.
Richard Noel Canevez, Jenifer Sunrise Winter and Joseph G. Bock
This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local violence prevention actors to potentially violent situations during demonstrations.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a distributed cognition lens, the authors explore the information processing of monitors within peace organizations. The authors adopt a qualitative thematic analysis methodology composed of interviews with monitors and documents from their shared communication and discussion channels. The authors’ analysis seeks to highlight how information is transformed between social and technical actors through the process of monitoring.
Findings
The authors’ analysis identifies that the technologization of monitoring for violence prevention to assist nonviolent activists produces two principal and related forms of transformation: appropriation and hidden attributes. Monitors “appropriate” information from sources to fit new ends and modes of representation throughout the process of detection, verification and dissemination. The verification and dissemination processes likewise render latent supporting informational elements, hiding the aggregative nature of information flow in monitoring. The authors connect the ideas of appropriation and hidden attributes to broader discourses in surveillance and trust that challenge monitoring and its place in peace work going forward.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the communicative and information processes of remote support monitors. The authors demonstrate that adoption of social and digital media information of incipient violence and response processes for its mitigation suggests both a social and technical precarity for the role of monitoring.
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