title: The effect of board characteristics on firm environmental performance

authors: de Villiers, Charl

subjects: middle managers

abstract: This article examines the strategic role of middle managers in the corporate entrepreneurial process from an attention-based perspective. By integrating literatures from multiple disciplines, the authors delineate the attention-based effects on how middle managers provide the impetus for different types of entrepreneurial opportunities (i.e., exploratory vs. exploitative initiatives). Specifically, middle managers, constrained by the attention structures of the firm, likely prescreen entrepreneurial opportunities from lower organizational levels and attend primarily to those that align with the strategic orientation of the firm. This tendency may be moderated by the presence of other players, middle managers’ structural positions, and the availability of slack resources. Moreover, in their efforts to sell initiatives to top management, middle managers may leverage “policy windows”—patterned regularities and irregularities in and around the organization—to exploit existing attention structures to their advantage or perhaps to dismantle those structures.

text: The effect of board characteristics on firm environmental performance This article examines the strategic role of middle managers in the corporate entrepreneurial process from an attention-based perspective. By integrating literatures from multiple disciplines, the authors delineate the attention-based effects on how middle managers provide the impetus for different types of entrepreneurial opportunities (i.e., exploratory vs. exploitative initiatives). Specifically, middle managers, constrained by the attention structures of the firm, likely prescreen entrepreneurial opportunities from lower organizational levels and attend primarily to those that align with the strategic orientation of the firm. This tendency may be moderated by the presence of other players, middle managers’ structural positions, and the availability of slack resources. Moreover, in their efforts to sell initiatives to top management, middle managers may leverage “policy windows”—patterned regularities and irregularities in and around the organization—to exploit existing attention structures to their advantage or perhaps to dismantle those structures.

year: 2011

title: Aphorisms and archipelagos: Relationality in modernist studies

authors: Long, Maebh

subjects: Literary Studies

abstract: Modernist studies, these days, is on the move. Global, planetary, transnational, postcolonial, and geomodernist rubrics map new routes of aesthetic interconnection and change as the geographical and temporal reaches of modernism are extended. Monographs and collections speak of mobility, dynamism, and hybridity across the local and the global, as texts trace out identities and contexts that are, as Jahan Ramazani puts it, ‘discretely located and thoroughly enmeshed, networked, cross-racialized’ (16). Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz, to take one example, write of ‘shifting concept[s] of fixity and centrality’ (3) in their New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (2016), and embrace modernism as a series of changing frames that react to local conditions, international systems, and a plurality of other spatial and temporal scales (8). Their book presents the moving parts of modernism through different lenses, allowing its global reach to present new terms and revitalise old ones, as changing local and international relations present different views.

text: Aphorisms and archipelagos: Relationality in modernist studies Modernist studies, these days, is on the move. Global, planetary, transnational, postcolonial, and geomodernist rubrics map new routes of aesthetic interconnection and change as the geographical and temporal reaches of modernism are extended. Monographs and collections speak of mobility, dynamism, and hybridity across the local and the global, as texts trace out identities and contexts that are, as Jahan Ramazani puts it, ‘discretely located and thoroughly enmeshed, networked, cross-racialized’ (16). Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz, to take one example, write of ‘shifting concept[s] of fixity and centrality’ (3) in their New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (2016), and embrace modernism as a series of changing frames that react to local conditions, international systems, and a plurality of other spatial and temporal scales (8). Their book presents the moving parts of modernism through different lenses, allowing its global reach to present new terms and revitalise old ones, as changing local and international relations present different views.

year: 2019

title: The social meaning potential of loanwords: Empirical explorations of lexical borrowing as expression of (social) identity

authors: Zenner, Eline

abstract: The use of loanwords is not merely a lexical act (filling a lexical gap in a given language, or using a shorter word in place of a longer expression) but also a socially meaningful one – a contextual expression of self, social identity and language regard. Recent lexical borrowing research has drawn attention to this social meaning potential of loanwords. What motivates language users to select a borrowed form over a receptor language equivalent, what is the (perceived) social meaning of this choice and how can we empirically address these questions? This special issue seeks to bring into debate the interface between speakers (the social dimension) and language (the linguistic dimension) with regard to lexical borrowing, and to probe how language regard and speaker identity influence and explain the use of loanwords. In a bid to better understand this complex interface, the special issue includes papers that explore a range of empirical methodologies drawn from different subfields of (socio)linguistics and closely related scientific domains (linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, social psychology and psycholinguistics) and documents a variety of contact situations: English loans into French and Finnish, Māori loanwords into New Zealand English, German loans into Dutch. Together, the different perspectives presented in this issue help advance our understanding of the relationship between lexical change on the one hand, and language regard and (social) identity on the other hand.

text: The social meaning potential of loanwords: Empirical explorations of lexical borrowing as expression of (social) identity The use of loanwords is not merely a lexical act (filling a lexical gap in a given language, or using a shorter word in place of a longer expression) but also a socially meaningful one – a contextual expression of self, social identity and language regard. Recent lexical borrowing research has drawn attention to this social meaning potential of loanwords. What motivates language users to select a borrowed form over a receptor language equivalent, what is the (perceived) social meaning of this choice and how can we empirically address these questions? This special issue seeks to bring into debate the interface between speakers (the social dimension) and language (the linguistic dimension) with regard to lexical borrowing, and to probe how language regard and speaker identity influence and explain the use of loanwords. In a bid to better understand this complex interface, the special issue includes papers that explore a range of empirical methodologies drawn from different subfields of (socio)linguistics and closely related scientific domains (linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, social psychology and psycholinguistics) and documents a variety of contact situations: English loans into French and Finnish, Māori loanwords into New Zealand English, German loans into Dutch. Together, the different perspectives presented in this issue help advance our understanding of the relationship between lexical change on the one hand, and language regard and (social) identity on the other hand.

year: 2019