Search results

The concept of childhoods is both socially constructed and unique to particular social settings. Based on an ethnographic study of five Nepali children’s homes, I argue that the localized contexts of these homes not only exist as spaces where youth negotiate their own unique statuses and futures but also where the social construction and fluidity of childhoods are most evident. By applying sociologist C. Wright Mills’ “sociological imagination,” we become best equipped to understand individual stories within these localized spaces as illustrative of what is ordinary and normalized at the local level, which in turn allows us to envision what is possible for broader society.

This chapter draws on findings from a comparative, qualitative research project investigating the decision-making of different groups of English higher education students in central England as they graduated from a Russell group university (46 interviewees) and a Post-92 university (28 interviewees). Half of the students graduated in 2014 (lower tuition fees regime) and the other half graduated in 2015 (higher tuition fees regime). The students interviewed were sampled by socio-economic background, gender, degree subject/discipline and secondary school type. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore students’ future plans and perceptions of their future job prospects. Despite higher debt levels, the 2015 sample of Russell Group graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds had a positive view of their labour market prospects and a high proportion had achieved either a graduate job or a place on a postgraduate course prior to graduation. This group had saved money whilst studying. The 2015 sample of Post-1992 University graduates (from both lower and average socio-economic backgrounds) were worried about their level of debt, future finances and labour market prospects. This chapter raises questions about whether a fairer university finance system, involving lower levels of debt for graduates from less advantaged backgrounds, might avoid some graduates’ transitions to adulthood being so strongly influenced by financial anxieties.

The goal of this project is to link the analysis of gender construction to reproductive health, sexuality, and development within the postdisaster context of Nepal and thereby, inform our understandings of these linkages more broadly, as well as provide new opportunities for promoting gender equity, reproductive health, and development in areas of conflict or disaster.

Using life history narratives, I examine the intersections among reproductive health, gender, and sexuality before, during, and postdisaster.

These life history interviews shed light on how socialization processes shape and determine adolescent girls' future actions and women's life opportunities. At both the individual and state levels, issues related to gender, sexuality, and reproductive health are exacerbated in times of crisis.

Life histories provide rich, thick descriptions of social life. However, they are limited in terms of reliability and making generalizations about larger populations. This chapter engages the reader, scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers in contemplating policy reform and initiation of context-based programs in times of natural disaster, political conflict, and other catastrophic events that disenfranchise those without agency and power.

This paper is unique in that it is the first to examine reproductive health and sexuality from the perspective of women living within a society bound by rigid gender and sexuality norms, but torn apart by natural disasters and the political and economic instability that follow in countries like Nepal.

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions are now the fundamental mechanisms of globalization and considered as prime vehicles for business engagement across the countries through the foreign direct investment route. Significant amounts of foreign funds are crossing the country borders for acquisitions with the objectives of earning super normal returns. But realizing super normal returns from foreign acquisitions are far more difficult than that of foreign greenfield projects or domestic M&As or greenfield projects. The super normal profit itself is “synergy” which is the main driving force for any M&A including the cross-border one. Even though foreign policies of individual countries affect cross-border M&A decisions, corporate and market-driven financial numbers significantly influence the synergy estimation. Synergy should bring in all round greater efficiency and value addition to all stakeholders. But if the cross-border deal is not financially crafted properly, it may fall flat causing more distress to the acquirer compared to domestic acquisition. The theory of synergy is well developed which mostly applies to the domestic M&As. But due to inherent differences between cross-border and domestic M&As, the same synergy theory may not apply equally to the cross-border ones. Therefore, a different connotation of synergy is propounded in this work for cross-border M&As, which can be a corollary to the conventional theory of synergy. This alternative theory of synergy aims at helping the companies in developing their own financial strategies before making their strategic decisions for cross-border M&A deals.

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are created by a group of specialists to pool funds for financing future acquisitions within a specified time limit. SPACs are basically “shell” companies with no operations and business, assets or liabilities but they acquire the status of public corporations through initial public offerings (IPOs). The SPAC founders use the IPO funds to acquire a potential target. They are generally found to be successful to close an mergers & acquisitions (M&A) deal but they may not bother to ensure perpetual success of the acquired entity for a long time. In many countries, “shell” companies are characterized as the “bad boys” of the corporate world but they can be used for long-lasting successful M&As due to their inherent strengths, if they play the role of protagonists and “good guys” as SPACs. This chapter examines how SPACs can be used as special vehicles to ensure worthy and successful acquisitions to create sustainable corporations.

Management buyout (MBO) is a specialized form of acquisition with different motives. Sometimes, there are initiatives taken by the senior management to bailout the firm from sickness. The predominant agency theory focuses only on the governance issues in the MBO firms and this theory can be applied to understand how managerial discretion can play vital roles in mitigating value destruction in the post-MBO firm. A CEO-led MBO is presumed to be greed-driven (Bebchuk, L., Cremers, M., & Peyer, U. (2011). The CEO pay slice. Journal of Financial Economics, 102, 199–221.). But a senior management team-led MBO is said to be a socialistic move. By default, MBOs are debt-driven, unless the buying management team is financially affluent, which may be rare, considering the price for the buyout. Private equity (PE) players play a dominant role in providing and or arranging funds in the form of equity and or debt. There is a notion that the PE investors help promote entrepreneurial and modern management practices. The MBO target firm has to ensure returning the entire money back to the sponsors within the shortest possible time out of the operational cash flow. Therefore, various issues like identifying a target firm, sourcing mix of finance, MBO price determination, value creation and value delivery to all stakeholders are all important for understanding the subject. This chapter attempts to construct a robust model for structuring MBO to ensure value fairness to all parties involved in the transaction.

India depicts the picture of severe social stringencies keeping girls away from attending school education due to the harsh reality of early child marriage and denial of aspirations of girl students in Indian society. The gender disparity in school educational attainment is evident as the figures of girls' enrollment in comparison to boys' enrollment at higher secondary stage of education in India always turn lower. In this context, measurement of technical efficiency (TE) is important because existence of technical inefficiency implies that one cannot produce maximum amount of output, given the resources, which can be interpreted as the penalty that the system is paying, and there is also the need to find out the relation between TE and gender inequality. The chapter contributes to the literature by (i) in the first stage estimating output-oriented TE of Indian higher secondary education for the period 2010–2011 to 2015–2016, using nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis, for general category states and (ii) in the second stage, using the estimated TE scores from the first stage, and the regression analysis establishing the positive impact of the girls' enrollment relative to boys' on the resulting TE and hence the positive role of gender equality in enrollment on enhancing TE. The favorable role of (1) “government expenditures on education (as a ratio to aggregate expenditure for the state),” “proportion of para teachers” and the adverse role of (2) “percentage of schools without girl's toilet” and “percentage of schools without building,” in determining TE of Indian higher secondary education are evident.

Many individuals are concurrently eligible for multiple sources of government-reimbursed health care services (e.g. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Medicare). Unclear is whether combined eligibility translates into increased access to care and/or improved outcomes of care. Alternatively continuity of care may suffer, promoting health inequalities when patients receive health services from multiple unrelated sources of care. The current study examines the impact of dual eligibility for government-reimbursed care on long-term outcomes of care for a population of veterans diagnosed with colorectal cancer and initially treated surgically at Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers.