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This paper explores how two understudied characteristics of a firm's product portfolio, namely, aging of products and (non)innovativeness of products, affect firm survival. The influence of these product portfolio characteristics on organizational mortality can be observed both at the firm and at the industry levels. Paradoxically, the portfolio's influence at the firm and at the industry levels may go in opposite directions. Specifically, I predict that portfolios with aging products make their firms weaker competitors and survivors. However by weakening these firms, “aging” portfolios reduce competitive pressures at the industry level and, therefore, improve firm survival indirectly by changing industry vital rates. In contrast, firms with innovative product portfolios should be stronger survivors. At the same time, they are likely to intensify competition in the industry and, as a result, diminish survival chances of all firms, including those with innovative products. The analyses of all firms’ product portfolios in the worldwide optical disk drive industry, 1983–1999, support these predictions.

Purpose: Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) young adults smoke at rates much higher than the general population. Young adults, in general, are less likely to seek medical help for smoking cessation and LGB individuals are less likely to seek health care generally. Alternative methods to encourage smoking cessation are necessary. This research seeks to establish whether LGB young adults in California would be willing to use social media for smoking cessation.

Approach: We conducted 41 qualitative interviews among LGB young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles in Fall 2014.

Findings: The results suggest that our participants were interested in a LGB-focused social media intervention, as long as the intervention was private or anonymous and moderated. Further, across topical areas our participants spoke extensively about the import of social connections. We may be able to leverage these connections to encourage cessation.

Research Limitations: This is a qualitative, non-generalizable dataset from a fairly limited geographic area.

Public Health Implications: Online smoking cessation interventions aimed at young adults would benefit from further testing with LGB young adults to ensure efficacy among this population. In addition, states and localities concerned about young adult LGB smoking might benefit from investing in an online socially mediated cessation forum. Online interventions could be scalable and might be useful for other groups who regularly face discrimination, stigma, or other stressors that make successful smoking cessation difficult.

The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats by religious and medical “experts,” but also of surgical assaults on female reproductive systems (Longo, 1979, 1986; Scull & Favreau, 1986; Sheehan, 1997). Less well known is the apparent obverse: the use of medical techniques to stimulate the female genitalia as a means of treating hysteria and other mental disorders (Maines, 1999; Schleiner, 1995). In this paper, I trace the cultural history (mainly Anglo-American) of the psychiatric enhancement, as well as repression, of female sexual pleasure, through various genital treatments, including the surgical and the electrical.¹ I then make the case that these “opposite” treatments are, in the context of Victorian society, two sides of the same coin of the patriarchal, medical control of female sexuality.²