Hamas: Strategic Challenge to the peace process

http://peacebuilding.no/eng/Regions/Middle-East-and-North-Africa/Israel-Palestine/Publications/Hamas-strategic-challenges-to-the-peace-process

Strategic development in exact calculation: Group and individual differences in four achievement subtypes

This longitudinal study sought to identify developmental changes
in strategy use between 5 and 7 years of age when solving exact
calculation problems. Four mathematics and reading achievement
subtypes were examined at four time points. Five strategies were
considered: finger counting, verbal counting, delayed retrieval,
automatic retrieval, and derived fact retrieval. Results provided
unique insights into children’s strategic development in exact calculation
at this early stage. Group analysis revealed relationships
between mathematical and/or reading difficulties and strategy
choice, shift, and adaptiveness. Use of derived fact retrieval by
7 years of age distinguished children with mathematical difficulties
from other achievement subtypes. Analysis of individual differences
revealed marked heterogeneity within all subtypes,
suggesting (inter alia) no marked qualitative distinction between
our two mathematical difficulty subtypes.

Claiming and displaying national identity: Irish Travellers' and students' strategic use of 'banal' and 'hot' national identity in talk

Two complementary explanations have been offered by social psychologists to account for the universal hold of national identity, first that national identity is ideologically assumed, as it forms the ‘banal’ background of everyday life, and second that national identity is ‘hotly’ constructed and contested in political and everyday settings to great effect. However, ‘banal’ and ‘hot’ aspects of national identity have been found to be distributed unevenly across national and subnational groups and banality itself can be strategically used to distinguish between different groups. The present paper develops these ideas by examining possible reasons for these different modes and strategies of identity expression. Drawing upon intergroup theories of minority and majority relations, we examine how a group who see themselves unequivocally as a minority, Irish Travellers, talk about their national identity in comparison to an age and gender-matched sample of Irish students. We find that Travellers proactively display and claim ‘hot’ national identity in order to establish their Irishness. Irish students ‘do banality’, police the boundaries and reputation of Irishness, and actively reject and disparage proactive displays of Irishness. The implications for discursive understandings of identity, the study of intra-national group relations and policies of minority inclusion are discussed.

An exploration of the attitudes and strategic responses of soleproprietor micro-enterprises in adopting information and communication technology

This article analyses longitudinal case-based research exploring the attitudes and strategic responses of micro-enterprise owners in adopting information and communication technology (ICT). In so doing, it contributes to the limited literature on micro-enterprise ICT adoption, with a particular focus on sole proprietors. It provides a basis for widening the theoretical base of the literature pertaining to ICT adoption on two levels. First, a framework is developed which integrates the findings to illustrate the relationships between attitudes towards ICT adoption, endogenous and exogenous influencers of these attitudes and subsequent strategic response in ICT adoption. Second, building upon this framework the article reveals the unique challenges, opportunities and implications of ICT adoption for sole-proprietor micro-enterprises. © The Author(s) 2012

On the Qualitative Comparison of Decisions Having Positive and Negative Features

Making a decision is often a matter of listing and comparing positive and negative arguments. In such cases, the evaluation scale for decisions should be considered bipolar, that is, negative and positive values should be explicitly distinguished. That is what is done, for example, in Cumulative Prospect Theory. However, contrary to the latter framework that presupposes genuine numerical assessments, human agents often decide on the basis of an ordinal ranking of the pros and the cons, and by focusing on the most salient arguments. In other terms, the decision process is qualitative as well as bipolar. In this article, based on a bipolar extension of possibility theory, we define and axiomatically characterize several decision rules tailored for the joint handling of positive and negative arguments in an ordinal setting. The simplest rules can be viewed as extensions of the maximin and maximax criteria to the bipolar case, and consequently suffer from poor decisive power. More decisive rules that refine the former are also proposed. These refinements agree both with principles of efficiency and with the spirit of order-of-magnitude reasoning, that prevails in qualitative decision theory. The most refined decision rule uses leximin rankings of the pros and the cons, and the ideas of counting arguments of equal strength and cancelling pros by cons. It is shown to come down to a special case of Cumulative Prospect Theory, and to subsume the “Take the Best” heuristic studied by cognitive psychologists.

The Bright Side of Manufacturing–Remanufacturing Conflict in a Decentralised Closed-Loop Supply Chain

Researchers and managers broadly agree that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which have opportunities to produce both new and remanufactured products, are better off by centrally controlling their manufacturing and remanufacturing activities. Thus, OEMs should not remanufacture used products until the remanufacturing cost is sufficiently low to overcome the negative impact of new product cannibalisation. In this paper, we present a contrasting view of the manufacturing–remanufacturing conflict: OEMs sometimes benefit from the decentralised control mode under which they ignore the internal cannibalisation rather than the remanufacturing option. We consider a decentralised closed-loop supply chain in which one OEM can purchase new components from one supplier to produce new products and collect used products from consumers to produce remanufactured products. The key feature of our model is that the OEM can select a centralised or decentralised control mode to manage its manufacturing and remanufacturing activities before the supplier prices the new component. In a steady state period setting, we analyse the players’ optimal decisions and compare the OEM's profits under centralised and decentralised control modes. Our analytic results reveal that the decentralised control within the OEM can outperform the centralised control when the cost structure of producing new and remanufactured products satisfies certain conditions. Finally, the key findings are distilled in a conceptual framework and its managerial implications are discussed.