bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
State and Citizenship in Modern Arab Muslim Thought
Authors: Safi Louay
Published: February 2017

Intellectual debates and sociopolitical changes in Arab societies have brought about new political outlooks and consciousness, and have resulted in profound political change and restructuring of state institutions. Reform efforts successfully introduced modern political institutions, but failed in effecting a broad and systematic transformation of political culture, as the latter continues to be guided by notions and practices rooted in the premodern models of authoritarian (“sultanic”) governance. The drive to political reform under the rubric of Tanzimat started around the turn of the 19th century as a matter of necessity by both Ottoman rulers (sultans), and their governors in Egypt and Tunisia, in response to European imperial expansion into Africa and Asia. By mid-20th century, political institutions and state bureaucracies were restructured in the mold of modern political ideas. Yet these ideas, and the ethical foundations on which they stood, failed to mature in post-Ottoman Muslim societies. Conservative forces resisted the new ideas. With the increased disenchantment of Muslim youth with postcolonial states, conservative thinkers reintroduced Islamic notions and values into the debate over the proper form of government in contemporary Muslim societies. The push to modernize society has been intense, empowering Muslim modernists to move ahead to reshape societal institutions. The zeal to bring about quick development effected indeed rapid modernization but led to the rise of autocratic governments, and further polarized Muslims societies. Notions of popular sovereignty and equal citizenship were countered by the sovereignty of Shari`ah and the need for religious differentiation and religious autonomy, thereby demanding the revival of the historical institutions of caliphate and dhimmis. The debate gradually moved toward compromise, whereby Muslim intellectuals and scholars attempted a creative synthesis on the common ground found in both traditional Islam and modern democratic liberal ideas. The transformation into a model that aligns Islamic values with the principles of democracy (or shura) and equal rights of citizens, while profound and increasingly broad, is still incomplete, as current struggles in Muslim societies demonstrate; intellectual and practical battles for the soul of Muslim societies continue to rage. The push back in the last two decades against modern notions of state and citizenship, and the rise in popularity of groups that aim at reviving the premodern institution of caliphate underscore the debate between old and modern notions of political organization and allegiance, and require deeper understanding of the nature of the tensions between premodern and contemporary political ideas and institutions.
Race, Sectionalism, and Religion in America
Authors: Crow John L.
Published: February 2017

Sectionalism denotes the division of a country, such as the United States, into sections based on shared cultures, religions, and racial, economic, and political identities. These sections then compete, putting their interests over those of the other sections. In the case of the United States, one of the most significant sectional conflicts was the Civil War, where North and South battled due to conflict over racial, economic, religious, and political differences. However, sectional conflict can be seen as early as British colonialism during which time the colonies competed with each other and with their governments in Europe and later as other sections such as the West developed its own characteristics and interests. Religion and race were frequently at the core of sectional conflicts, in everything from the Revolutionary War, the drafting of the Constitution, the failure of compromise regarding slavery, and the intermittent battles with Native Americans over land and religious practice to the emergence of the West and the great immigration and religious innovation that took place there. In all these cases, sections constructed identities in which race and religion were fundamental and were also significant points of contention. Even today, at the beginning of the 21st century, sectionalism continues with geographic sections still battling for dominance, and cultural sections square off in what is commonly called the culture wars.
folktale
Authors: Hansen William
Published: February 2017

Folktales are traditional fictional stories. Unlike works of original literary fiction, they are normally anonymous narratives that have been transmitted from one teller to another over an uncertain period of time, and have been shaped by multiple narrators into the form and style that are characteristic of oral narratives. The transmission of traditional tales is predominantly oral, but in literate societies such as Greece and Rome, transmission also takes place via written works.

“Folktale” is an umbrella term for a number of subgenres: the wonder tale (commonly known as the fairytale), the religious tale, the novella, the humorous tale (with its subforms the joke and the tall tale), the animal tale, and the fable. Since there was no ancient notion of folktales as such, no compilation of folktales exists from antiquity—only compilations of particular genres of folktales such as the fable and the joke.

Unlike myths and legends, folktales are narrative fictions, make no serious claim to historicity, and are not ordinarily accorded credence. They differ from myths and especially from legends in their handling of the supernatural.
Derivational Economy in Syntax and Semantics
Authors: Bošković Željko , Messick Troy
Published: February 2017

Economy considerations have always played an important role in the generative theory of grammar. They are particularly prominent in the most recent instantiation of this approach, the Minimalist Program, which explores the possibility that Universal Grammar is an optimal way of satisfying requirements that are imposed on the language faculty by the external systems that interface with the language faculty which is also characterized by optimal, computationally efficient design. In this respect, the operations of the computational system that produce linguistic expressions must be optimal in that they must satisfy general considerations of simplicity and efficient design. Simply put, the guiding principles here are (a) do something only if you need to and (b) if you do need to, do it in the most economical/efficient way. These considerations ban superfluous steps in derivations and superfluous symbols in representations. Under economy guidelines, movement takes place only when there is a need for it (with both syntactic and semantic considerations playing a role here), and when it does take place, it takes place in the most economical way: it is as short as possible and carries as little material as possible. Furthermore, economy is evaluated locally, on the basis of immediately available structure. The locality of syntactic dependencies is also enforced by minimal search and by limiting the number of syntactic objects and the amount of structure accessible in the derivation. This is achieved by transferring parts of syntactic structure to the interfaces during the derivation, the transferred parts not being accessible for further syntactic operations.
Experimental Pragmatics
Authors: Schwarz Florian
Published: February 2017

While both pragmatic theory and experimental investigations of language using psycholinguistic methods have been well-established subfields in the language sciences for a long time, the field of Experimental Pragmatics, where such methods are applied to pragmatic phenomena, has only fully taken shape since the early 2000s. By now, however, it has become a major and lively area of ongoing research, with dedicated conferences, workshops, and collaborative grant projects, bringing together researchers with linguistic, psychological, and computational approaches across disciplines. Its scope includes virtually all meaning-related phenomena in natural language comprehension and production, with a particular focus on what inferences utterances give rise to that go beyond what is literally expressed by the linguistic material.

One general area that has been explored in great depth consists of investigations of various ‘ingredients’ of meaning. A major aim has been to develop experimental methodologies to help classify various aspects of meaning, such as implicatures and presuppositions as compared to basic truth-conditional meaning, and to capture their properties more thoroughly using more extensive empirical data. The study of scalar implicatures (e.g., the inference that some but not all students left based on the sentence Some students left) has served as a catalyst of sorts in this area, and they constitute one of the most well-studied phenomena in Experimental Pragmatics to date. But much recent work has expanded the general approach to other aspects of meaning, including presuppositions and conventional implicatures, but also other aspects of nonliteral meaning, such as irony, metonymy, and metaphors.

The study of reference constitutes another core area of research in Experimental Pragmatics, and has a more extensive history of precursors in psycholinguistics proper. Reference resolution commonly requires drawing inferences beyond what is conventionally conveyed by the linguistic material at issue as well; the key concern is how comprehenders grasp the referential intentions of a speaker based on the referential expressions used in a given context, as well as how the speaker chooses an appropriate expression in the first place. Pronouns, demonstratives, and definite descriptions are crucial expressions of interest, with special attention to their relation to both intra- and extralinguistic context. Furthermore, one key line of research is concerned with speakers’ and listeners’ capacity to keep track of both their own private perspective and the shared perspective of the interlocutors in actual interaction.

Given the rapid ongoing growth in the field, there is a large number of additional topical areas that cannot all be mentioned here, but the final section of the article briefly mentions further current and future areas of research.
Derivational Morphology
Authors: Lieber Rochelle
Published: February 2017

Derivational morphology is a type of word formation that creates new lexemes, either by changing syntactic category or by adding substantial new meaning (or both) to a free or bound base. Derivation may be contrasted with inflection on the one hand or with compounding on the other. The distinctions between derivation and inflection and between derivation and compounding, however, are not always clear-cut. New words may be derived by a variety of formal means including affixation, reduplication, internal modification of various sorts, subtraction, and conversion. Affixation is best attested cross-linguistically, especially prefixation and suffixation. Reduplication is also widely found, with various internal changes like ablaut and root and pattern derivation less common. Derived words may fit into a number of semantic categories. For nouns, event and result, personal and participant, collective and abstract noun are frequent. For verbs, causative and applicative categories are well-attested, as are relational and qualitative derivations for adjectives. Languages frequently also have ways of deriving negatives, relational words, and evaluatives. Most languages have derivation of some sort, although there are languages that rely more heavily on compounding than on derivation to build their lexical stock. A number of topics have dominated the theoretical literature on derivation, including productivity (the extent to which new words can be created with a given affix or morphological process), the principles that determine the ordering of affixes, and the place of derivational morphology with respect to other components of the grammar. The study of derivation has also been important in a number of psycholinguistic debates concerning the perception and production of language.
Lexical Semantic Framework for Morphology
Authors: Andreou Marios
Published: February 2017

The central goal of the Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF) is to characterize the meaning of simple lexemes and affixes and to show how these meanings can be integrated in the creation of complex words. LSF offers a systematic treatment of issues that figure prominently in the study of word formation, such as the polysemy question, the multiple-affix question, the zero-derivation question, and the form and meaning mismatches question.

LSF has its source in a confluence of research approaches that follow a decompositional approach to meaning and, thus, defines simple lexemes and affixes by way of a systematic representation that is achieved via a constrained formal language that enforces consistency of annotation. Lexical-semantic representations in LSF consist of two parts: the Semantic/Grammatical Skeleton and the Semantic/Pragmatic Body (henceforth ‘skeleton’ and ‘body’ respectively). The skeleton is comprised of features that are of relevance to the syntax. These features act as functions and may take arguments. Functions and arguments of a skeleton are hierarchically arranged. The body encodes all those aspects of meaning that are perceptual, cultural, and encyclopedic.

Features in LSF are used in (a) a cross-categorial, (b) an equipollent, and (c) a privative way. This means that they are used to account for the distinction between the major ontological categories, may have a binary (i.e., positive or negative) value, and may or may not form part of the skeleton of a given lexeme. In order to account for the fact that several distinct parts integrate into a single referential unit that projects its arguments to the syntax, LSF makes use of the Principle of Co-indexation. Co-indexation is a device needed in order to tie together the arguments that come with different parts of a complex word to yield only those arguments that are syntactically active.

LSF has an important impact on the study of the morphology-lexical semantics interface and provides a unitary theory of meaning in word formation.
End-of-Life Care Issues
Authors: Darrell Linda P.
Published: February 2017

The perspective of end-of-life care has changed over the years. People are living longer, fuller lives due to advanced medical care and technology along with an increased interest in healthier lifestyles. The focus of end-of-life care has expanded to include accidental and sudden, unexpected death, chronic illness, anticipated death from longevity, and illnesses impacting children. An expanded perspective of end-of-life care must account for the challenges and changes of service delivery within a multi-cultural 21st-century milieu. The significance of advanced medical technology and improved lifestyles is an important component of a primary multidisciplinary assessment to understand the impact of such a life-altering occurrence as end-of-life care. Equally as important is a culturally inclusive perspective to accommodate the significance of longevity due to improved lifestyles, advanced medical technology, ethnicity, spirituality, and racial awareness. This article will explore the multiple concerns surrounding end-of-life care issues from an expansive worldview.
Was the Devonian geomagnetic field dipolar or multipolar? Palaeointensity studies of Devonian igneous rocks from the Minusa Basin (Siberia) and the Kola Peninsula dykes, Russia
Authors: Shcherbakova V V , Biggin A J , Veselovskiy R V , Shatsillo A V , Hawkins L M A , Shcherbakov V P , Zhidkov G V
Published: February 2017

Defining variations in the behaviour of the geomagnetic field through geological time is critical to understanding the dynamics of Earth's core and its response to mantle convection and planetary evolution. Furthermore, the question of whether the axial dipole dominance of the recent palaeomagnetic field persists through the whole of Earth's history is fundamental to determining the reliability of palaeogeographic reconstructions and the efficacy of the magnetosphere in shielding Earth from solar wind radiation. Previous palaeomagnetic directional studies have suggested that the palaeofield had a complex configuration in the Devonian period (419–359 Ma). Here we present new high-quality palaeointensity determinations from rocks aged between 408 and 375 Ma from the Minusa Basin (southern Siberia), and the Kola Peninsula that enable the first reliable investigation of the strength of the field during this enigmatic period. Palaeointensity experiments were performed using the thermal Thellier, microwave Thellier and Wilson methods on 165 specimens from 25 sites. Six out of eight successful sites from the Minusa Basin and all four successful sites from the Kola Peninsula produced extremely low palaeointensities (<10 μT). These findings challenge the uniformitarian view of the palaeomagnetic field: field intensities of nearly an order of magnitude lower than Neogene values (except during relatively rare geomagnetic excursions and reversals) together with the widespread appearance of strange directions found in the Devonian suggest that the Earth's field during this time may have had a dominantly multipolar geometry. A persistent, low intensity multipolar magnetic field and associated diminished magnetosphere would increase the impact of solar particles on the Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and atmosphere with potential major implications for Earth's climate and biosphere.
Mixed Pain Can Be Discerned in the Primary Care and Orthopedics Settings in Spain
Authors: Ibor Pedro J. , Sánchez-Magro Isabel , Villoria Jesús , Leal Ana , Esquivias Ana
Published: February 2017

Objectives:

To assess the value of the concept of mixed pain by investigating its acceptance and interpretation by health care professionals and the differential characteristics in patients with mixed pain.

Materials and Methods:

Data from 5024 patients with pain from 551 sites in Primary Care and Orthopedics settings were analyzed in this cross-sectional study. Pain characteristics, other factors influencing pain, health care–related data and health-related quality of life were summarized and compared among 3 groups of patients according to the type of pain (nociceptive, neuropathic, or mixed), as assigned by the investigators after considering the pathophysiological mechanisms involved.

Results:

Pain was of mixed pathophysiology in most patients (59.3%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 59.2%-59.5%), followed by nociceptive (31.8%; 95% CI, 31.6%-32.0%) and neuropathic pathophysiology (8.9%; 95% CI, 8.8%-9.1%). Patients with mixed pain had pain in >1 site more frequently than the other groups. Spinal conditions was the attributed cause of pain in >80% of patients with mixed pain, whereas nonspinal osteoarthritis represented almost a third. Patients with mixed pain showed a greater clinical complexity than the remaining patients, as they reflected: more comorbidities, adverse psycho-social factors, health care resource utilization, undertreatment, and perceived difficulties in patient management, but less perceived effectiveness of treatments and a lower health-related quality of life.

Discussion:

An independent category in the pathophysiological classification of pain is justified based on the differential characteristics of patients with mixed pain, although conceptualization of mixed pain should be improved. Increasing referrals to other specialists or implementing chronic pain management programs would seem advisable.

Conclusions:

Patients with mixed pain showed more clinical complexity than patients with other types of pain. The consideration of mixed pain as an independent pathophysiological category may be justifiable on empirical clinical grounds.
Ischemic Stroke in Young Adults
Authors: Montanaro Vinícius V.A. , Freitas Denise d.S. , Ruiz Miguel C.M. , Cavalcanti Eduardo B.U. , Marinho Patricia B.C. , Freitas Maria C.D.N.B. , Oliveira Eleonora M.J.d.
Published: February 2017

Introduction:

The societal and economic impact of ischemic stroke in young adults is considerable. The etiological investigation of ischemic stroke in this population is also challenging.

Objective:

To describe the characteristics of young patients with ischemic stroke admitted to a neurological rehabilitation program in Brazil.

Methods:

This transversal retrospective study analyzed data from the electronic health records of 134 patients aged 18 to 45 years with ischemic stroke admitted from 2008 to 2012.

Results:

The average patient age at the time of ictus was 33 years; 56% of the subjects were female, and 29.3% had undetermined etiologies of stroke, on the basis of both TOAST and SSS TOAST criteria. Further, 48.7% of the subjects had a known vascular risk factor, which was arterial hypertension in most cases. The results of thrombophilia testing were positive in 13.7% of patients, but in only 3.7% of patients, thrombophilia was determined to be the causal mechanism of the stroke. There was a significant association between thrombophilia and patent foramen ovale, but no significant association was found between thrombophilia and arterial dissection. Among the patients with artery dissections, 46% had a history of trauma, which was statistically significant.

Conclusions:

Etiological diagnosis of stroke in the young is challenging for clinicians. Hence, a more effective classification scheme, better investigative mechanisms, and correct determination of causal associations in ischemic stroke are needed. Thrombophilia screening should be performed in the presence of relevant clinical signs and/or family history.
Stopping smooth pursuit
Authors: Missal Marcus , Heinen Stephen J.
Published: February 2017

If a visual object of interest suddenly starts to move, we will try to follow it with a smooth movement of the eyes. This
smooth pursuit
response aims to reduce image motion on the retina that could blur visual perception. In recent years, our knowledge of the neural control of smooth pursuit initiation has sharply increased. However, stopping smooth pursuit eye movements is less well understood and will be discussed in this paper. The most straightforward way to study smooth pursuit stopping is by interrupting image motion on the retina. This causes eye velocity to decay exponentially towards zero. However, smooth pursuit stopping is not a passive response, as shown by behavioural and electrophysiological evidence. Moreover, smooth pursuit stopping is particularly influenced by active prediction of the upcoming end of the target. Here, we suggest that a particular class of inhibitory neurons of the brainstem, the omnipause neurons, could play a central role in pursuit stopping. Furthermore, the role of supplementary eye fields of the frontal cortex in smooth pursuit stopping is also discussed.

This article is part of the themed issue ‘Movement suppression: brain mechanisms for stopping and stillness’.
Enabling cross-study analysis of RNA-Sequencing data
Authors: Wang Qingguo , Armenia Joshua , Zhang Chao , Penson Alexander V. , Reznik Ed , Zhang Liguo , Minet Thais , Ochoa Angelica , Gross Benjamin E. , Iacobuzio-Donahue Christine A. , Betel Doron , Taylor Barry S. , Gao Jianjiong , Schultz Nikolaus
Published: February 2017

Driven by the recent advances of next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and an urgent need to decode complex human diseases, a multitude of large-scale studies were conducted recently that have resulted in an unprecedented volume of whole transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) data. While these data offer new opportunities to identify the mechanisms underlying disease, the comparison of data from different sources poses a great challenge, due to differences in sample and data processing. Here, we present a pipeline that processes and unifies RNA-seq data from different studies, which includes uniform realignment and gene expression quantification as well as batch effect removal. We find that uniform alignment and quantification is not sufficient when combining RNA-seq data from different sources and that the removal of other batch effects is essential to facilitate data comparison. We have processed data from the Genotype Tissue Expression project (GTEx) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and have successfully corrected for study-specific biases, enabling comparative analysis across studies. The normalized data are available for download via GitHub (athttps://github.com/mskcc/RNAseqDB).
Signaling architectures that transmit unidirectional information despite retroactivity
Authors: Shah Rushina , Del Vecchio Domitilla
Published: February 2017

A signaling pathway transmits information from an upstream system to downstream systems, ideally in a unidirectional fashion. A key obstacle to unidirectional transmission is retroactivity, the additional reaction flux that affects a system once its species interact with those of downstream systems. This raises the fundamental question of whether signaling pathways have developed specialized architectures that overcome retroactivity and transmit unidirectional signals. Here, we propose a general procedure based on mathematical analysis that provides an answer to this question. Using this procedure, we analyze the ability of a variety of signaling architectures to transmit one-way (from upstream to downstream) signals, as key biological parameters are tuned. We find that single stage phosphorylation and phosphotransfer systems that transmit signals from a kinase show a stringent design trade-off that hampers their ability to overcome retroactivity. Interestingly, cascades of these architectures, which are highly represented in nature, can overcome this trade-off and thus enable unidirectional transmission. By contrast, phosphotransfer systems, and single and double phosphorylation cycles that transmit signals from a substrate are unable to mitigate retroactivity effects, even when cascaded, and hence are not well suited for unidirectional information transmission. Our results identify signaling architectures that, allowing unidirectional transmission of signals, embody modular processes that conserve their input/output behavior across multiple contexts. These findings can be used to decompose natural signal transduction networks into modules, and, at the same time, they establish a library of devices that can be used in synthetic biology to facilitate modular circuit design.
Rule-based modeling using wildcards
Authors: Andrews Steven S.
Published: February 2017

Many biological molecules exist in multiple variants, such as proteins with different post-translational modifications, DNAs with different sequences, and phospholipids with different chain lengths. Representing these variants as distinct species, as most biochemical simulators do, leads to the problem that the number of species, and chemical reactions that interconvert them, typically increase combinatorially with the number of ways that the molecules can vary. This can be alleviated by “rule-based modeling methods,” in which software generates the chemical reaction network from relatively simple “rules.” This article presents a new approach to rule-based modeling. It is based on wildcards that match to species names, much as wildcards can match to file names in computer operating systems. It is much simpler to use than the formal rule-based modeling approaches developed previously but can also lead to unintended consequences if not used carefully. This article demonstrates rule-based modeling with wildcards through examples for: signaling systems, protein complexation, polymerization, nucleic acid sequence copying and mutation, the “SMILES” chemical notation, and others. The method is implemented in Smoldyn, a spatial and stochastic biochemical simulator, for both the generate-first and on-the-fly expansion, meaning whether the reaction network is generated before or during the simulation.
The social and spatial ecology of dengue presence and burden during an outbreak in Guayaquil, Ecuador, 2012
Authors: Lippi Catherine A. , Stewart-Ibarra Anna M. , Muñoz Ángel G. , Borbor Mercy J. , Mejía Raúl , Rivero Keytia , Castillo Katty , Cárdenas Washington B. , Ryan Sadie J.
Published: February 2017

Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease, is an ongoing public health problem in Ecuador and throughout the tropics, yet we have a limited understanding of the disease transmission dynamics in these regions. The objective of this study was to characterize the spatial dynamics and social-ecological risk factors associated with a recent dengue outbreak in Guayaquil, Ecuador. We examined georeferenced dengue cases (n = 4,248) and block-level census data variables to identify potential social-ecological variables associated with the presence and burden of dengue fever in Guayaquil in 2012. We applied LISA and Moran’s I tests to analyze hotspots of dengue cases and used multimodel selection in R computing language to identify covariates associated with dengue incidence at the census zone level. Significant hotspots of dengue transmission were found near the North Central and Southern portions of Guayaquil. Significant risk factors for presence of dengue included poor housing conditions (e.g., poor condition of ceiling, floors, and walls), access to paved roads, and receipt of remittances. Counterintuitive positive correlations with dengue presence were observed with several municipal services such as garbage collection and access to piped water. Risk factors for the increased burden of dengue included poor housing conditions, garbage collection, receipt of remittances, and sharing a property with more than one household. Social factors such as education and household demographics were negatively correlated with increased dengue burden. Our findings elucidate underlying differences with dengue presence and burden and indicate the potential to develop dengue vulnerability and risk maps to inform disease prevention and control - information that is also relevant for emerging epidemics of chikungunya and zika.

Highlights

In 2012, Guayaquil, Ecuador had a large outbreak of dengue cases

Dengue case presence and burden exhibited spatial heterogeneity at the census block level

Social-ecological drivers of case presence and burden differed in this outbreak, highlighting the need to model both types of epidemiological data

Access to municipal resources such as garbage collection and piped water had counterintuitive relationships with dengue presence, but poor housing, garbage collection and remittances correlated to dengue burden.

Our findings inform risk mapping and vector control and surveillance allocation, relevant to this and other concurrent emergent epidemics such as chikungunya and zika
Crystal structures of three sterically congested disilanes
Authors: Pichaandi Kothanda Rama , Mague Joel T. , Fink Mark J.
Published: February 2017

In the three sterically congested silanes, C24H38Si2(1) (1,1,2,2-tetraisopropyl-1,2-diphenyldisilane), C24H34Br4Si2(2) [1,1,2,2-tetrakis(2-bromopropan-2-yl)-1,2-diphenyldisilane] and C32H38Si2(3) (1,2-di-tert-butyl-1,1,2,2-tetraphenyldisilane), the Si—Si bond length is shortest in (1) and longest in (2), with (3) having an intermediate value, which parallels the increasing steric congestion. A comparison of the two isopropyl derivatives, (1and2), shows a significant increase in the Si—C(ipso) distance with the introduction of bromine. Also, in the brominated compound2, attractive intermolecular Br...Br interactions exist with Br...Br separationsca0.52 Å shorter than the sum of the van der Waals radii. In compound2, one of the bromoisopropyl groups is rotationally disordered in an 0.8812 (9):0.1188 (9) ratio. Compound3exhibits `whole molecule' disorder in a 0.9645 (7):0.0355 (7) ratio with the Si—Si bonds in the two components making an angle ofca66°.
Where silence speaks-insights from Third World NGOs
Authors: Chakraborty Kamalika , Saha Biswatosh , Jammulamadaka Nimruji
Published: February 2017

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the conflation between the silence and purported passivity of the Third World NGOs (TNGOs). Explaining the invisibility of their voices in the critical and post-development perspectives, it locates the inquiry in the context of the action of these TNGOs.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper follows the phronetic research approach, which involves a case study of a locally developed Indian NGO. It uses phronetic inquiry along with Ashis Nandy’s notion of “silent coping” as the conceptual framework. To explain the purported passivity of TNGOs in the texts under global circulation, the paper uses Walter Mignolo’s discussion on “texts in circulation”.

Findings

The uncertain nature of action – that it begets further action possibilities; precludes the prospect of visualizing such action spaces in the context of their generation. This emergent nature of local action spaces makes it difficult to capture them within the dominating global discursive structures, thereby creating local spaces of agency for the TNGO actors. Selective appropriation of artefacts and texts from the global circulation and the creation of alternate stake structures at the local level support the realization of such action spaces. Further, such local artefacts and texts do not travel into texts circulating globally, thereby rendering the TNGOs invisible and silent in the reading of global texts and leading to the TNGOs being framed as passive.

Originality/value

This paper locates the voices and acts of the TNGOs and highlights the mechanisms that enable them to silently cope with structures of discursive domination, thereby contributing to post-development studies and post-colonial organizational analysis.
Corporate social responsibility as relief from responsibility
Authors: Herlin Heidi , Solitander Nikodemus
Published: February 2017

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to get a deeper understanding how not-for-profit organizations (NPOs) discursively legitimize their corporate engagement through cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) in general, and particularly how they construct legitimacy for partnering with firms involved in the commodification of water. The paper seeks to shed light on the values embedded in these discursive accounts and the kind of societal effects and power relations they generate, and the authors are particularly interested in understanding the role of modernity in shaping their responsibilities (or lack of them) via various technologies and practices

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995), the authors analyze the discursive accounts of three water-related CSPs involving the three biggest bottled water producers in the world (Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Danone) and three major non-profits (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the World Wildlife Foundation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

Findings

The NPO’s legitimate their corporate engagement in the water CSPs through the use of two global discourses: global governance discourse and the global climate crisis discourse. Relief from responsibility is achieved through three processes: replacement of moral with technical responsibility, denial of proximity and the usage of intermediaries to whom responsibility is outsourced.

Originality/value

This paper explores the processes of legitimizing accounts for CSPs, particularly focusing on NPO discourse and their use of CSR elements and the consequences of such discursive constructs, and this has received little to no attention in previous research.
Inducing the internationalisation of family manufacturing firms from a transition context
Authors: Marinova Svetla , Marinov Marin
Published: February 2017

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the internationalisation inducement in family firms with domestic capital operating in a specific industry in a transition country. Examining the effect of entrepreneur-, firm- and context- specific factors, it provides an insight into the start of internationalisation via exporting and its initiating features.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses a qualitative research approach. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews from informants with conclusive decision-making power and analysed using a combination of inductive and deductive coding.

Findings

The findings show that the sample firms internationalise early exhibiting mostly proactive behaviour in finding international clients. Owner-manager international orientation and commitment combined with contacts in his or her social spaces lead to early export inducement despite the fusion of ownership and control, and regardless of transition context volatility and inefficiency.

Research limitations/implications

The limitations include the sample size and its industry embeddedness limiting generalisability. The key implications are that family firms need support to develop their social spaces through encouraging and enabling linkages between socio-economic actors that can expand the bounded sociality of the firm.

Originality/value

The owner-manager orientation, objectives, commitment and characteristics, coupled with the straightforward decision-making process that is safeguarded by full family ownership, can abate the dissuading role of the perceived lack of institutional support for small and medium-sized enterprise internationalisation in a transition context.
Exploring the generalizability of discriminant word items and latent topics in online tourist reviews
Authors: Dickinger Astrid , Lalicic Lidija , Mazanec Josef
Published: February 2017

Purpose

Online reviews have been gaining relevance in hospitality and tourism management and represent an important research avenue for academia. This study aims to illustrate the discrimination between positive and negative reviews based on single word items and the sector-specific relevance of hidden topics.

Design/methodology/approach

By probing two parallel approaches of entirely unrelated analytical methods (penalized support vector machines and Latent Dirichlet Allocation), the analysts explore differences in language between favorable and unfavorable reviews in three service settings (hotels, restaurants and attractions).

Findings

The percentage of correctly predicted positive and negative review reports by means of individual word items does not decrease if reports from the three tourism businesses are analyzed together.

Originality/value

However, there is limited generalizability of the discriminant words across the three businesses. Also, the latent topics relevant for generating customers’ review reports differ significantly between the three sectors of tourism businesses.
Ambassadors of knowledge sharing
Authors: Edwards Deborah , Cheng Mingming , Wong IpKin Anthony , Zhang Jian , Wu Qiang
Published: February 2017

Purpose

The aim of this study is to understand the knowledge-sharing structure and co-production of trip-related knowledge through online travel forums.

Design/methodology/approach

The travel forum threads were collected from TripAdvisor’s Sydney travel forum for the period from 2010 to 2014, which contains 115,847 threads from 8,346 conversations. The data analytical technique was based on a novel methodological approach – visual analytics, including semantic pattern generation and network analysis.

Findings

Findings indicate that the knowledge structure is created by community residents who camouflage as local experts and serve as ambassadors of a destination. The knowledge structure presents collective intelligence co-produced by community residents and tourists. Further findings reveal how these community residents associate with each other and form a knowledge repertoire with information covering various travel domain areas.

Practical implications

The study offers valuable insights to help destination-management organizations and tour operators identify existing and emerging tourism issues to achieve a competitive destination advantage.

Originality/value

This study highlights the process of social media mediated travel knowledge co-production. It also discovers how community residents engage in reaching out to tourists by camouflaging as ordinary users.
Research on innovation in family businesses: are we building an ivory tower?
Authors: Fuetsch Elena , Suess-Reyes Julia
Published: February 2017

Purpose

One of the central requirements of research is that the knowledge acquired should not only be academically rigorous, but also socially useful. If an article fails to address practical relevance, the audience will question its value and respond with “so what?”. Due to recent criticism regarding the practical relevance of innovation research, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether a similar “ivory divide” prevails in research on innovation in family businesses. More specifically, this paper investigates to what extent and at what depth researchers generate practical implications for innovation in family businesses. Furthermore, different strategies to bridge the “ivory divide” are discussed.

Design/methodology/approach

This literature review systematically analyses the findings of 50 journal articles focusing on innovation in family businesses published between 2004 and 2015. Based on this, the articles are classified according to their degree of practical relevance.

Findings

Although the findings unanimously show the relevance of innovation for strengthening business’s performance, only a minority of articles offer in-depth implications for practitioners in terms of practical guidance for action and application-oriented recommendations. A number of reasons for the development of this “ivory divide” are discussed and suggestions for how the connection between research and practice could be strengthened are provided.

Originality/value

This paper attempts to provide an impulse toward more practically oriented family business research in order to increase its interestingness to academics and its value to practitioners.
Exploring barriers to South Asian help-seeking for eating disorders
Authors: Wales Jackie , Brewin Nicola , Raghavan Raghu , Arcelus Jon
Published: February 2017

Purpose

Referrals to specialist eating disorder (ED) services from the South Asian (SA) community are under-represented, despite research suggesting that disordered eating attitudes and behaviours of SA people are similar to the population in general. The purpose of this paper is to identify the reasons for this and sought to inform ways to encourage help-seeking.

Design/methodology/approach

A qualitative methodology was used to investigate barriers to help-seeking for EDs among the SA community. A key informant focus group was conducted with clinicians working within the local specialist ED service (participants n=16, 12 female, 4 male). Six focus groups were conducted with members of the SA community in Leicester, UK (participants n=28, 23 female, 5 male), recruited from a local university, two charities and Children, Young People and Family Centres.

Findings

A number of themes emerged as possible factors for delaying early access to help: lack of knowledge about EDs and their potential seriousness, ideals regarding body shape, family living circumstances and the role of food in the community. Participants acknowledged stigma among their community associated with mental health issues, including EDs and concerns about confidentiality when approaching services, particularly primary care.

Originality/value

General practitioners and specialist services need to be aware of the potential barriers to help-seeking for EDs as early specialist help is recommended for effective treatment. An educational campaign around EDs specifically designed with the SA community in mind may improve awareness, reduce stigma and promote early help-seeking.
The influence of leader’s creativity on employees’ and team creativity
Authors: Wen Liqun , Zhou Mingjian , Lu Qiang
Published: February 2017

Purpose

This study aims to explore the domain of leader’s creativity and suggests that leader’s creativity can be present as both worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity. Then, the study examines the influence of leader’s worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity on employees’ creativity and team creativity. As a contextual factor, the identification with leader is taken as a moderator at both the individual and team levels.

Design/methodology/approach

With data that was collected from 229 employees and 32 team leaders in entrepreneurial and R&D teams of China, hierarchical regression is conducted to test the hypotheses at individual and team levels separately.

Findings

The results show that leader identification plays a different role in moderating the effects of worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity on employees’ and team creativity. For the relationships between worker-role creativity and employees’ and team creativity, they are positive when leader identification is high and negative when it is low. For the relationships between manager-role creativity and team creativity, it is stronger when leader identification is higher rather than lower.

Research limitations/implications

This study answers the call for studying the roles of creative role models and provides new evidence of the leader as a role model. The exploration of the domain of leader’s creativity and the different effects on creative outcome brings an interesting perspective on creativity and leadership research.

Originality/value

The present study draws on the advance to develop the content of leader’s creativity. Then, the moderating role of identification with leader between leader’s creativity and employees’ creativity and team creativity is comprehensively examined.
Career patterns of young highly skilled migrants from Southeast Europe in Austria
Authors: Winterheller Julian , Hirt Christian
Published: February 2017

Purpose

Using a Bourdieuian perspective, the purpose of this paper is to analyse how highly skilled migrants (HSMs) from transition economies develop their careers by accumulating and using career capital upon migration.

Design/methodology/approach

An interpretative approach was chosen to depict the career patterns of 18 HSMs from Southeast Europe. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather data about their career experiences in Western Europe and their home countries.

Findings

Findings reveal four different career patterns that show how individuals develop their careers and adjust to the work environment by accumulating and using career capital. Building up country-specific work-related social contacts and gaining work experience in local companies were found to represent key elements in their adjustment process. Additionally, the findings show that organisational support facilitates the processes of individual adjustment.

Originality/value

This paper emphasises that individuals do not always have to assimilate to the work environment of the host country but can also bargain over the value of their career capital in their adjustment process. Contrasting with previous literature this perspective presents a novelty.