Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine how legitimacy as “an entrepreneur” is gained in relation to others during the nascent phase.

The author studies two firm creating teams over a 12‐month incubation period. Data collected through participant observation, documentation and interviews are emploted as narratives in order to explore how nascent entrepreneurs gain legitimacy through social interaction. Positioning theory is used to explore how negotiated rights and duties are employed towards legitimacy‐gaining strategies.

Conforming, selecting and manipulating strategies are used to gain legitimacy during a process of firm creation through interactive dialogue with key stakeholders (role‐set). Positioning facilitates a process of negotiated rights and duties that helps to define the role of “entrepreneur” to which the nascent entrepreneurs aspire.

The study is bounded to a specific contextual setting and thus initial findings would benefit from further investigation in comparable and control settings. Findings illustrate the ways in which nascent entrepreneurs employ legitimacy‐gaining strategies through interaction with key stakeholders, an area of research not well understood. This contributes to an understanding of how entrepreneurial identity is developed.

Designed firm creation environments can facilitate interaction with key stakeholders and support positioning of nascent entrepreneurs as they attempt to gain legitimacy in the role of “entrepreneur”, while creating a new firm. Legitimacy‐gaining strategies can strengthen entrepreneurial identity development, which can be applied to multiple entrepreneurial processes.

The article accesses individuals in the process of becoming entrepreneurs, a phenomenon most often studied in hindsight. Emphasis on stakeholder interaction as contributing to entrepreneurial development is also understudied. Legitimacy‐gaining strategies are explored through narratives using positioning theory, an approach which has been discussed conceptually but not readily applied empirically.

The impact of the threat of redundancy on teachers in Northern Ireland is examined. The problems of anger, anxiety and confusion which form part of the general impact of redundancy on teachers are highlighted. Redundancy is shown to have a particular impact on young teachers who are rarely able to build up sufficient job security to protect them from the redundancy process. It is suggested that there is a general acceptance by teachers of managerial arguments concerning the need for redundancies, and considerable criticism is expressed of the role played by trade unions. Anxiety is also expressed about the role of school principals in the redundancy process. The lack of managerial skills is also highlighted.

This paper aims to study the relationship between the ball grid array (BGA) flip-chip underfilling process parameter and its void formation region.

A set of top-down scanning acoustic microscope images of BGA underfill is collected and void labelled. The labelled images are trained with a convolutional neural network model, and the performance is evaluated. The model is tested with new images, and the void area with its region is analysed with its dispensing parameter.

All findings were well-validated with reference to the past experimental results regarding dispensing parameters and their quantitative regional formation. As the BGA is non-uniform, 85% of the test samples have void(s) formed in the emptier region. Furthermore, the highest rating factor, valve dispensing pressure with a Gini index of 0.219 and U-type dispensing pattern set of parameters generally form a lower void percentage within the underfilling, although its consistency is difficult to maintain.

This study enabled manufacturers to forecast the void regional formation from its filling parameters and array pattern. The filling pressure, dispensing pattern and BGA relations could provide qualitative insights to understand the void formation region in a flip-chip, enabling the prompt to formulate countermeasures to optimise voiding in a specific area in the underfill.

The void regional formation in a flip-chip underfilling process can be explained quantitatively with indicative parameters such as valve pressure, dispensing pattern and BGA arrangement.

The crop insurance purchase decision for a group of Kansas farmers is analyzed using farm‐level data from the 1990s, a period that experienced many changes in the federal crop insurance program. Results indicate a reduction in the elasticity of the demand for crop insurance with respect to premium rates by the end of the decade. The reduction in demand elasticity corresponded with a considerable increase in government subsidies by the end of the 1990s. This result may also reflect the attractiveness of new revenue insurance products which may have made producers less sensitive to premium changes.

A vast amount of educational literature has repeatedly documented the overrepresentation of African American male students in exclusionary school punishment. However, amid the wealth of data and statistics on the topic, a viable theoretical explanation, that helps to make sense of the disproportionately high number of suspensions for Black males, remains relatively absent. Drawing upon the Method of Theory Triangulation, this chapter uses three conceptual frames to develop a plausible, causal narrative for deconstructing how pose, perception, and threat converge create a perfect storm of conditions that perpetuate discriminatory discipline practices. Based on the theoretical considerations implicit in this account, practical recommendations are offered to educational stakeholders who might be interested in improving school discipline practices and reducing the number of Black males disproportionately targeted for disciplinary action.

This paper aims to summarize the importance of rare materials for academic libraries, including developments since the arrival of the internet and the effects of declining library budgets.

The authors reviewed the literature on the subject coupled with their experiences with collection development.

Collecting rare materials remains important for scholarly research, though harder to justify during a period of budget stringency. Academic libraries should discover creative ways to discover and add rare materials to their collections. Rare materials require special expertise in their acquisition, processing, storage, and use. Digitization is making rare materials more accessible but cannot substitute for the use of the originals in all cases.

The authors provide a summary of recent thought on the status of rare materials in academic libraries – for libraries that include such collections or for those interested in increasing their holdings of rare materials.

The paper provides a summary of recent trends in collecting rare materials in academic libraries.

This study examines whether a unique set of emotions may be generated by advertisements for apparel products and brands for a young female target audience. Also studied were the effects of emotions on evaluative perceptions of apparel brand advertisements (ad attitude). Test advertisements consisted of 90 advertisements representing 56 different brands. Using an aggregate‐level communication model, all analysis in the study was performed across advertisements, not across people, as sampling units of interest. Findings show a unique set of three emotional dimensions generated by the apparel brand advertisements. Two emotional dimensions, pleasure/activation (eg activation, bored, desired, social affection) and hypoactivation (drowsy, restful, soothed), had a positive influence on ad attitude. The third dimension, domination (anger, fear, irritation, tension), did not have a significant effect on ad attitude, having neither good nor bad effect on evaluations of advertisements.

The paper considers whether and how Calvinism as a specific type of religion, ideology, and social system impacts political democracy in modern society. In contrast to the previous sociological and related literature assuming only a positive or negative linear effect, the paper proposes that Calvinism exerts mixed positive-negative and non-linear effects on democracy. The purpose of this paper is to aim at making a contribution to the sociological theory and research on Calvinism and democracy and modern society in general.

A combination of comparative and historical sociological methodology.

The main proposition and finding is that whether Calvinism is likely to have a positive or negative impact on democracy is the function of its specific position within social structure and its concrete phase of development. Thus, different positions of Calvinism in social structure are linked to its differential consequences in aggregate for democracy, and various stages of its development to time-variable non-linear effects in sequence.

This is a relatively novel finding innovating and expanding on the literature's assumption that Calvinism has a structurally uniform, either positive or negative, and linear, time-constant effect on democracy.

In his apocalyptic book on the environment and public policy, Timothy C. Weiskel warned of the consequences of humanity's intrusion into the biological and geo‐chemical processes of the natural world. He said that our intrusions have been massive and thorough; that they now threaten to transform ecosystemic parameters; and that unless responsible public policy directs itself toward moderating our current destructive impact on the environment, we will face ecosystemic collapse and human catastrophe “on a vastly greater scale than has ever been recorded in human history.”