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The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

The chapter provides empirical research results on the peculiarities of social innovation and the specific features that its business model must support. It concludes by proposing a Social Innovation Business Model Canvas and steps towards Social Innovation typologies.

The research is based on the results of a comparative analysis of 25 business case studies and 32 biographies conducted within the SIMPACT research framework. We then implemented a process of reverse engineering to uncover the business models behind the cases which facilitated the creation of a typology for different social innovation business models. Reverse engineering is the application of tools and processes used to study new business ventures in comparison with existing ones. As such, it sheds further light on the broad characteristics of social business models and their value creation mechanisms. The evidence coming from the cases were analyzed within a new business model and clustered to identify a typology of business models of social innovations.

The main SIMPACT findings, resulting from the reverse engineering process and upon which our discussion is based, can be seen in the following distinguishing characteristics of SI business models. SI business models are: configured around finding complementarity between antagonistic assets and seemingly conflicting logics; often structured around a divergence in the allocation of cost, use, and benefit leading to multiple value propositions; modeled on multiactor/multisided business strategies, and developed as frugal solutions and through actions of bricolage. Four typologies of social innovation were identified: beneficiary as actor, beneficiary as customer, beneficiary as user, and community-asset-based models.

While much attention has been placed on for-profit business models, there is little literature on social/not-for-profit business models. This chapter can add to this gap by providing substantial empirical evidence.

Practitioners in the field of social innovation, particularly the growing intermediary sector, could integrate the findings of the research in their work.

The work is also leading to the construction of a future business toolbox for social innovation, which will be even more useful for incubators, accelerators, and supporting structures.

Research presented in this chapter is the result of an extensive comparative analysis across all of Europe, including examples of failure, and the first to propose a typology of SI Business Models.

This paper was written to show that what has come to be called the social model of disability appeared as the primary analytical framework in research published by sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the name and constructs of the model have changed over the years, its roots are clearly present in the earlier sociological literature. The author looked for evidence of these roots.

The paper’s findings are based on a literature review and synthesis. For illustrative purposes, four publications were selected as case examples.

All of the components of the social model – locus of the problem in society, activism as a solution, and consumer control – appeared in the earlier literature. In addition, these studies conducted in the 1970s and earlier distinguished between the individual and social model, although they used different terminology.

Researchers need to go beyond simple electronic literature searches in order to find books and articles written prior to 1980. Otherwise, they may be “reinventing the wheel.”

Most recent literature in disability studies acknowledges a debt to the social model theorists of the 1990s. This paper suggests that their debt extends back much further and that the social model is part of a long tradition of sociological thinking.

Alternative enterprises – organizations that operate as a business while still also being driven by a social purpose – are sometimes owned by workers or other stakeholders, rather than shareholders. What role does ownership play in enabling alternative enterprises to prioritize substantively rational organizational values, like environmental sustainability and social equity, over instrumentally rational ones, like profit maximization? We situate this question at the intersection of research on: (1) stakeholder governance and mission drift in both hybrid and collectivist-democratic organizations; and (2) varieties of ownership of enterprise. Though these literatures suggest that ownership affects the ability of alternative enterprises to maintain their social missions, the precise nature of this relationship remains under-theorized. Using the case of a global, social, and environmental values-based banking network, we suggest that alternative ownership is likely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to combat mission drift in enterprises that have a legal owner. A supermajority of this network’s banks deploy alternative ownership structures; those operating with these structures are disproportionately associated with social movements, which imprint their values onto the banks. We show how alternative ownership acts through specific mechanisms to sustain enterprises’ missions, and we also trace how many of these mechanisms are endogenous to alternative ownership models. Finally, we find that ownership models vary in how well they enable the expression and maintenance of these social values. A ladder of mission-sustaining ownership models exists, whereby the dominance of substantive, non-instrumental values over operations and investment becomes increasingly robust as one moves up the rungs from mission-driven investor ownership to special shareholder and member-ownership models.

We contribute to the growing literature examining how social enterprises might best accommodate their hybrid structure when pursuing dual goals of social improvement and economic sustainability. Drawing on extant literature, the case is made for why synergy between the social and commercial business models that hybrid social enterprises employ should positively impact effectiveness in delivering organization outcomes. We then develop a method for comparing the synergy between the social and commercial business models employed within and across organizations, and test the method using a sample of seven social enterprises operating in different social fields. Results demonstrate that our method can be applied consistently across a range of social enterprise types and that variation in degree of synergy is considerable with overlap rates ranging from 9% to 77%. Using learning from this exploratory study, we develop propositions describing how and why social entrepreneurs develop business model synergy, the relationship between business model synergy and organizational performance, and suggest future research to test these propositions. Implications for theory development and practice are discussed.

This chapter reviews qualitative research on parenting children with disabilities published over the last 50 years to explore whether shifts in academic discourse and changes in professional training have affected research on parenting and/or the experiences of parents who are the subject of such research.

An extensive literature search was conducted, and 78 peer-reviewed, qualitative studies on the experience of parenting a child with a disability were included in the sample. Themes were extracted from the reviewed literature and compared across decades.

The findings of the present review suggest that some aspects of the parenting experience have changed very little. In particular, parents continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children’s lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals, and a lack of needed services continue to create problems and inspire an entrepreneurial response. In addition, stigmatizing encounters with others continue to be a common occurrence. In contrast to earlier decades, studies conducted in more recent years have begun to use the social model of disability as an analytic frame and also increasingly report that parents are questioning and challenging the concept of “normal” itself.

Additional improvements are needed in professional education and services to reduce the negative reactions experienced by parents of children with disabilities.

The findings of this meta-analysis can serve as a guide to future research on parenting children with disabilities.

In a globalised economy, the EU, being self-confident, could shape international standards by defending and promoting its own socioeconomic model. Social democratic parties rhetorically confess the need for a ‘European social model’, but meanings and ways to achieve it differ largely. In a comparative case study on the programmatic positioning of the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the Spanish Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the parties' perspectives on the integration mode and their handling of the Economic and Monetary Union framework and its crisis over the last decade are traced. Although similar paths from neoliberal convictions of the ‘third way’ to a positive integration process in a fiscal union setting are found, the scope and levels vary, illustrating the abilities of both parties to meet new transnational challenges. The crisis of the Eurozone was a definitive turning point for the positioning of the Social Democrats in Spain in favour of more political and fiscal integration. In contrast, their German comrades already advocated increased social integration of the EU since 2005 but remained very cautious regarding reforms of the economic framework established by the Eurozone.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.