Search results

This paper aims to discuss how over the past 180 years, a succession of largely unrelated entrepreneurs of differing capabilities have either created or recognised and exploited opportunities offered by this enduring company, their heritage and brand.

Primary data was provided from discussions with Fabergé experts and the new owners of the brand. Extensive secondary data was also used and analysed.

The original Fabergé creations numbered some 200,000, but their creator is remembered best for 65 unique Imperial (and other) Eggs. Many pieces have survived, although the business disappeared in 1917. Since then, dealers and collectors have intervened symbiotically to protect the brand equity – supported by serendipitous popular cultural interventions – although a series of parallel entrepreneurial but parasitic interventions meant the brand and the original products became separated. This changed in 2007 with new owners acquiring the brand and resurrecting high-end jewellery production with a new business model. Their contemporary journey is both informed and shaped by Fabergé’s tumultuous past.

Reinforces that while a universal theory of entrepreneurship eludes us that these three key elements – opportunity, uncertainty and resources – help explain the related behaviour of a series of different intervening entrepreneurs. This framework is offered for wider use and testing.

Advances the understanding of how entrepreneurs spot and enact opportunity.

Develops a model embracing parasitic and symbiotic interventions in the history of a brand, and a conceptual entrepreneurial model capturing three key elements that explain entrepreneurial behaviour. These being: opportunity seeking and exploitation, addressing uncertainty and deploying appropriate resources.

Sustainable solutions for meeting the physical, emotional and social health care needs of individuals may be realized by shifting the care landscape; for instance, through innovative models of service-integrated housing (SIH). By diversifying populations in these settings, care recipients can choose to engage their skills and abilities toward assisting co-residents, and vice versa as a form of symbiosis. The purpose of this paper is to define attributes of the concept and practice of symbiotic care.

The authors drew on firsthand field experience and secondary data from a literature review to conduct a conceptual derivation and analysis, using Walker and Avant’s methodology. The term symbiotic mutualism was derived from the field of biology as an analogy for care exchanged between non-peer co-residents. Attributes, antecedents and consequences of symbiotic care were identified and illustrated using model, borderline and contrary case descriptions.

Four defining attributes of symbiotic care were identified: first, cohabitation: care recipients live closely together in SIH settings. Second, non-peer: co-residents have distinct, complementary needs and abilities. Third, mutualism: co-residents experience mutually significant benefits as a result of the activities of their co-residents. Fourth, agency-sponsored: the professional SIH agency or organization attends to unmet resident needs.

Symbiotic care is a relatively rare phenomenon for which little research exists. This analysis provides a starting point for empirical research, policy and program development and critical evaluation.

This paper fills a wide gap in the research literature and offers important terminology. It is the first to define the attributes of symbiotic care.

The informal economy is more than the inverse of the formalised economy, but is a dynamic environment. It is less limited by legal rules, state control, bureaucracy or tax regulation. On the other hand the informal market is less visible than the regular economy. The purpose of this paper is to find out how informal markets are currently developing.

This contribution is based on a literature review of primarily European work from scholars active in different disciplinary fields, concentrating upon presentations made during the seminars given for the EU Framework 6 CRIMPREV programme. It is structured using a matrix of potentially interesting variables: disciplinary interaction and the need for a multidisciplinary discourse; the position of nation states as a fundamental variable for the existence of the informal economy; general global economic dynamics and their implications for the concept of the informal economy; the interplay of formal, informal and criminal markets; the functionalities of informal markets for the classic survival economy; the dangerousness of wrong perceptions of informal markets and finally the contribution of different methodologies to the knowledge of the informal economy.

The matrix is incomplete and further input is welcome.

This paper could be a start for the comparison of analyses of informal markets in time and space, without the limitations of the classic categories such as organised crime and in limiting definitions.

This chapter explores the radical potentials of mycelic practice. Mycelium is the root network of mushrooms, consisting of spores, which seeks nourishment in their surroundings, constantly spreading, showing ability to interpret its environmental circumstances and distributing nourishment to the spores needing it the most. Each spore develops individual and flexible characteristics, but always in contact with the communal mycelic body. The chapter unpacks the four phases of mycelic life and death: expansion, cannibalism, heksering formation and communication. Mycelic practice, as expansive and cannibalistic, invites us to surpass our individuality, reject the ego and any given dominant order of, say, Western civilisation, such as individual ownership or capitalist logics of growth. Death is part of life. Death sustains life. Just as closeness or intimacy involves awareness of absence understood as that which is not visibly present. Each of the phases in the life and death of mycelium points towards particular strategies and ways of working: politics, organising, methods, writing and citing. Each phase contributes to the critique disrupting the hegemonic political orders.

The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the Dutch property market from the angle of crime‐inducing conditions and circumstances.

The perspective adopted is in line with recent developments in the study of crime and crime prevention, which focus not so much on perpetrators, as on the opportunities they have to commit a criminal offence.

Despite the exploratory character of the analysis, it can be concluded that the real estate sector lends itself very well to an entwining of regular and irregular activities. Real estate has become booming business, attracting domestic and foreign investment. The market is closed, dominated by old boy networks, with possibilities to conceal irregularities. Regulations, law enforcement and (both formal and informal) control seem to be inadequate. Hence, it is less transparent than other markets and enables legitimate and illegitimate entrepreneurs to meet, co‐operate and share expertise and knowledge.

Strategies to prevent serious forms of crime in the real estate sector vary from self‐regulation and administrative measures to public and private policing. The various public and private institutions tend to stick to a primarily domestically oriented approach, whilst social research in this area is still predominantly based on national studies. The author recommends that comparative, multidisciplinary empirical research on irregularities and crime in the real estate sector in various (European) countries needs to be conducted.

This is one of the first attempts to apply principles of analysis of potential crime‐inducing vulnerabilities to the real estate sector.

The essay, “inventions, capitalist wealth and liberal think” is a philosophical discourse. It points out a similarity between aristocratic and capitalist wealth. Both arise out of the receipt of producer surplus. The sources of producer surplus are somewhat different. For the aristocracy, the source was largely land whereas inventions are more significant for capitalist wealth. Wealth gives power, which can be exercised in different ways and yield different social and political outcomes. One particularly noteworthy offshoot is the ideology that is devised to defend and rationalize wealth and its usages. The ideology that serves capitalist wealth is quite unique and varied in nature, and is not as mutually consistent as might be expected.

In Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean draws attention to the influence that James M. Buchanan’s work has had on the political economic discourse of the past half century. Buchanan and his collaborators in the Virginia Political Economy tradition have provided intellectual firepower for efforts to delegitimize democratically sanctioned policies aimed at alleviating the dysfunctional consequences of market activity. While MacLean’s account contains some well-documented inaccuracies, her characterization of Buchanan’s agenda is broadly accurate. This chapter assesses Buchanan’s economics in light of the themes raised by MacLean. His work, we shall argue, is a modern manifestation of what Marx termed “vulgar economy,” that is, ruling-class ideology posing as science.

This paper aims to examine the socio-political factors and the influence of spatial reconfiguration and transformation orchestrated by the forceful migration of Bororo herdsmen – a nomadic ethnic group from the Central African Republic into east Cameroon where they are now subsistent farmers. This livelihood transition strategy led to conflict and competition over natural resources with the local inhabitants.

The study draws from ethnographic interviews and participant observation involving security officials and international relief agencies alongside their implementing partners. Data abducted from various stakeholders were further complemented by reports produced by various humanitarian agencies and desk research – evaluation and reinterpretation of what others have written on pastoral peoples.

The paper suggests that humanitarian agencies be aware of “transnational borderland identities” by considering the specificity of particular borderland regions-isolation, underdevelopment and prone to conflict in crises of forced migration. They further need to move from a spatialized “refugee-centric” approach to the conversion of refugee relief into local development projects for refugee hosting areas.

While the problem of resource use conflict caused by the influx of refugees might be local, it highlights regional and global security concerns and articulates the growing recognition of political and environmental factors for national and international security.

The study articulates the need to shift from a spatialized “refugee-centric” regime that directs attention only to one category of social actors in an emergency situation to a more integrative assistance programme so as to erase the fake division of identities as well as to acknowledge the importance of a “border identity” for a more peaceful development aimed at achieving better social interaction between hosts and refugees. While the problem of resource use conflict caused by the influx of refugees might be local, it highlights regional and global security concerns and articulates the growing recognition of political and environmental factors for national and international security.

We argue that by conducting systematic research with communities rather than on communities, community-based research (CBR) methods can both advance the study of human interaction and strengthen public understanding and appreciation of social sciences. CBR, among other methods, can also address social scientists’ ethical and social commitments. We recap the history of calls by leading sociologists for rigorous, empirical, community-engaged research. We introduce CBR methods as empirically grounded methods for conducting social research with social actors. We define terms and describe the range of methods that we include in the umbrella term, “community-based research.” After providing exemplars of community-based research, we review CBR’s advantages and challenges. We, next, summarize an intervention that we undertook as members of the Publication Committee of the URBAN Research Network’s Sociology section in which the committee developed and disseminated guidelines for peer review of community-based research. We also share initial responses from journal editors. In the conclusion, we revisit the potential of community-based research and note the consequences of neglecting community-based research traditions.

This paper aims to investigate the innovation pathway of gerontechnological enterprises under the market-organization-technology (MOT) perspective through configuration analysis.

Based on the analytical framework of technology, organization and market, this paper conducts configuration analysis on the cases of 55 elderly-friendly enterprises in China combined with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

First, this study identifies the three first-level preconditions affecting innovation performance: organization's architectural innovation, technology adapting to aging and market environment attention on the innovation pathway of gerontechnological enterprises. These three first-level conditions include six sub-conditions. Second, this study investigates three innovation pathways by analyzing the configuration effects of preconditions: Configuration 1, technology-balanced type; Configuration 2, organization-market linkage type and Configuration, 3 balanced type. Third, there are differences in the distribution of different configuration types in subdivided industries. The technology-balanced configuration is mainly concentrated in design-driven innovative enterprises, the organization-market linkage configuration is mainly concentrated in medical auxiliary equipment enterprises and the balanced configuration is mainly concentrated in smart elderly care service platform enterprises empowered by digital technology. Fourth, there are differences in the innovation impact paths of the same configuration type. However, the essence lies in the high-level innovation performance formed by the coordinated evolution of technology, organization and market factors, reflecting the characteristics of the same goal through different routes.

The authors' study generates new insights for innovation managers of gerontechnological enterprises about the innovation pathway.

This research enriches innovation management by integrating the linkage adaptation relationship among market, organization and technology factors; further research studies on the different configuration types suitable for different types of enterprises, as well as differentiated innovation pathways under the same configuration type, could contribute to the study on the innovation pathway under a premise of MOT.