Search results

Anchoring vignettes have become a popular method to adjust self-assessed data for systematic differences in reporting behaviour to aid comparability, for example, of cross-country analyses. The method relies on the two fundamental assumptions of response consistency and vignette equivalence. Evidence on the validity of these assumptions is equivocal. This chapter considers the utility of the vignette approach by considering how successful the method is in moving self-assessed reports of health mobility towards objective counterparts. We draw on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and undertake pairwise country comparisons of cumulative distributions of self-reports, their objective counterparts and vignette adjusted reports. Comparison of distributions is based on tests for stochastic dominance. Multiple cross-country comparisons are undertaken to assess the consistency of results across contexts and settings. Both non-parametric and parametric approaches to vignette adjustment are considered. In general, we find the anchoring vignette methodology poorly reconciles self-reported data with objective counterparts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical insights about service branding from higher education administrators (HEAs) perspectives and to identify the main factors involved in their strategic thinking in this sector.

Adopting a qualitative approach, 22 in-depth interviews were performed in Brazilian HEAs to analyze service branding as a strategic institutional process in this context.

Findings reveal that service branding depends on several factors, e.g., in this case, deep integration between branding and services, leadership involvement, strong value propositions, sharing of strategic guidelines, branding experiences and, finally, credibility and reputation. Excellence of service is considered essential in higher education (HE) and, therefore, service branding faces the challenge of promoting the provision of quality services.

Although there have been many studies relating to HE and branding, few authors have studied service branding in educational sector and which issues must be observed in a competitive marketplace.

Investigates urban bias in state policy making in Mexico. Refers to literature claiming that rural poverty in developing nations is a major problem because capitalism reflects an urban bias. Examines social security coverage for the rural poor in Mexico and notes that there are great variations depending on area, suggesting that social security coverage is politically negotiable. Outlines briefly the historical development of Mexico’s welfare state and uses a power resource model to demonstrate how groups with competing interests go about securing benefits from the state. Cites literature on dependency theory, indicating that rural groups have failed to mobilize politically and have therefore not secured the same state resources (such as social security benefits and housing) as urban groups, yet argues that this does not always apply in Mexico, partially due to party politics and bureaucratic paternalism. Explains how data was collected to examine regional variations in social security coverage among the rural poor and how the data was analysed. Reveal that workers in important international export markets (such as cotton and sugar) have greater political leverage in obtaining better social security benefits. Notes also that areas supporting the political party in power obtain better benefits. Concludes, therefore, that rural workers are not powerless in the face of urban capitalism and that urban bias and dependency theories do not reflect the situation in Mexico – rather social security benefits are politically negotiable.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the care provision of charity organizations that assist people in situations of economic vulnerability. After analyzing central theoretical elements of kinning, the authors contend that charity organizations function as symbolic families for people in need.

Ethnographic fieldwork was performed in two sites of a large catholic charity organization in the outskirts of Barcelona. Ethnographic fieldwork included participant observations and informal interviews with individuals located under the official poverty threshold.

Symbolic family bonds among different individuals are created through the entwining of interconnectedness, obligation and commitment, sense of belonging, interdependence and the projection of symbolic spaces of hearth. The authors propose the term of “disposable families” (akin to that of Desmond’s, 2013 for dyadic relationships) because a remarkable feature of these bonds is its short-term nature.

The consideration of charities as symbolic families offers new insights into their social role and may contribute to reshaping the social function within emergency situations.

This research opens new ground for the understanding of charities as something else than care providers, as the relational dimension with clients extends beyond the conventional patron/client relationship. This fact has particular relevance in an economic context of post-crisis, with the Welfare State withdrawal and a deterioration of the traditional sources of informal support.

This paper introduces the main ideas and concepts underlying Web services, and their potential for a new generation of Internet‐based distributed applications. A summary of the key standards that are the foundation of Web services technology and its underlying basic model is provided, exploring the potential for interoperability among independently managed systems. This is of special importance for libraries, along with the advantage of reducing the development and deployment costs of distributed applications, and of leveraging the value of IT and data legacy assets. The paper explains developments in Web services technology in the library field and underlines its significance for changes in the library information systems paradigm.

Precontractual liability may be imposed when a party acts in bad faith to damage the other party, when a party negotiates in order to discover business secrets with no intention of reaching a final agreement, or when a party to a non‐binding letter of intent terminates negotiations during a later phase of negotiations without legitimate reason. The purpose of this article is to clarify the concept of the duty to negotiate in good faith, either for Civil Law or Common Law system practitioners.

The paper describes the concept of good faith and fair dealing and its effects on the negotiation process. After establishing this description, we will analyze the differences in the interpretation and the application of the concept of good faith in the pre‐contractual procedure. The article explores the Civil Law approach for this matter, followed by the Common Law approach. In order to illustrate the Common Law System, we will focus on English and American Law, while we will look mainly at German, Brazilian and French Law to illustrate the Civil Law. In the conclusion, we will compare the approaches of the two systems.

The obligation of good faith in negotiation is found practically in all civil law system countries and generally provides a remedy for a wrongful conduct produced by a bad faith act. However, there is no general rule in Common Law requiring the parties to negotiate in good faith. We are in favor of applying a more expansive view of good faith obligations for international business transactions involving two or more different countries from these two different legal systems (civil law and common law), so as to apply them to the duty to negotiate arising from preliminary agreements and negotiations.Although there is no general rule about pre‐contractual liability in the common law system, we strongly believe that the existing body of case law and statutes may punish a party which engages in unfair conduct at the pre‐contract stage if the parties had signed a letter of intent or a memorandum of understanding, requiring them expressly and clearly to “act in good faith” and/or “to use their best efforts to reach an agreement”.

This article has discussed a relatively unexplored area related to the obligation of good faith in negotiation either for civil law and common law's practitioners. Our research has highlighted the complexity of this matter between these two legal systems, and has helped to the identification of the concept of good faith in a relation between two or more parties.

Previous literature dealing with sustainable marketing in a B2B context is mostly limited to spot measures on an environmental, economic or social layer. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to exemplify how seaports as powerful economic business networks can facilitate multi-layered sustainability.

The authors integrate multiple case studies to pursue an inductive research approach to derive general patterns based on empirical observations.

Operationalizing the concept of a port community enables the authors to show how seaports not only facilitate multi-layered sustainability but also mutually interact. Hence, port sustainability can be achieved through and by a port community.

The conceptualization of the interplay between port community and multi-layered sustainability contributes to the business and industrial marketing literature in general and to the yet hitherto scarce port marketing literature in particular. Future research should go beyond this initial conceptualization by gathering further empirical research.

The study outlines how strengthening interactions among port management stakeholders (i.e. business and non-business actors such as port authorities and policymakers) might lead to higher economic success and societal welfare by pooling yet hitherto independent resources.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to define how the concept of a holistic port community can facilitate sustainability acted out on its three pillars and how both concepts interact.

This paper aims to study the results of the public aid programmes, through supply-side subsidies, for ultra-fast next generation access (NGA) broadband deployment that have been developed in The Canary Islands since 2013. These findings will, in turn, hopefully help the policymakers of archipelagos define their own ultra-fast broadband development plans.

An empirical approach has been used, based on the observation of the historical results obtained in the archipelago and the way broadband was diffused throughout the territory.

Results show that the broadband has developed asymmetrically in the archipelago, which, in turn, has caused the onset of a triple spatial digital divide. It was also observed that some aspects of the current way that such programmes are created and, consequently, the way that public funds are allocated, that could be improved and might help prevent geographical discrimination. Lastly, several insights have been presented for further investigation.

A large amount of scientific research has been carried out studying ultra-fast broadband NGA networks deployment. Less literature can be found on this topic when considering the specificities of fragmented territories like archipelagos. This paper tries to contribute with some empirical insights about such specific scenarios.

A survey of the attitudes of students in eight countries towards the revelations of mass surveillance by the US’ NSA and the UK’s GCHQ has been described in an introductory paper and seven country-specific papers (The People’s Republic of China and Taiwan are combined in a single paper). This paper aims to present a comparison of the results from these countries and draws conclusions about the similarities and differences noted.

A questionnaire was deployed in Germany, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, The People’s Republic of China, Spain, Sweden and Taiwan. The original survey was in English, translated into German, Japanese and Chinese for relevant countries. The survey consists of a combination of Likert scale, Yes/no and free-text responses. The results are quantitatively analysed using appropriate statistical tools and the qualitative answers are interpreted (including, where appropriate, consolidated into quantitative results).

There are significant differences between respondents in the countries surveyed with respect to their general privacy attitudes and their willingness to follow Snowden’s lead, even where they believe his actions served the public good.

Owing to resource limitations, only university students were surveyed. In some countries (Germany and New Zealand), the relatively small number of respondents limits the ability to make meaningful statistical comparisons between respondents from those countries and from elsewhere on some issues.

Snowden’s actions are generally seen as laudable and having had positive results, among the respondents surveyed. Such results should give pause to governments seeking to expand mass surveillance by government entities.

There have been few surveys regarding attitudes to Snowden’s revelations, despite the significant press attention and political actions that have flowed from it. The context of attitudes to both the actions he revealed and the act of revelation itself is useful in constructing political and philosophical arguments about the balance between surveillance activity for state security and the privacy of individual citizens.

Many universities run Writing Centers to provide support for students wishing to improve their academic literacy. These centers are ideal venues for peer tutoring, which may benefit both student-tutors (through tutoring skills development), and those tutored (through opportunities to discuss writing with a supportive peer). In the context of a university in the GCC region, peer tutors, prior to working, must complete required Communication courses. The syllabuses reflect student-centered and collaborative post-process writing approaches, where scaffolding is emphasized over direction, and word-by-word instructor correction of student writing is de-emphasized. Peer tutors also undergo preparation aimed at equipping them with an understanding of the rationale for these approaches and the skills needed to adapt them to tutoring. Given these experiences, the researchers set out to determine whether tutors are able to articulate such understandings and apply them to tutoring. Interconnected interpretative methods were deployed, including tutoring observation, consultation-conversation analysis and semi-structured interviews with tutors. Results indicate that tutors have significant recent experience of non-directive writing classes and may be aware of the rationale and benefits of such approaches. However, in their tutoring, content appears to be transferred from their most recent experiences but their style relies on instruction predominated by telling, explaining, demonstrating and directing, reflecting formative experience at school. The relationship between tutors’ experience, preparation, articulation and practice is explored, and recommendations are made to enhance Writing Center practices, in line with the concept of a constructively-aligned instruction system where all components address the same agenda and support each other.