The impact of added cultural distance and cultural diversity on international expansion patterns: a Penrosian perspective

International strategy research has identified a variety of multinational enterprise (MNE) expansion patterns. Some MNEs appear to expand internationally at a stable rate, whereas others expand rapidly in one period and then tend to experience slower growth. The latter pattern suggests the occurrence of the Penrose effect. We identified two determinants of these diverging patterns. First, we propose that high levels of added cultural distance (reflecting expansion into new local contexts) during one period, may negatively affect further international expansion because of dynamic adjustment costs. Second, we suggest that managing a network of subsidiaries operating in a set of local contexts with high cultural diversity, increases environmental and internal governance complexity. Extant cultural diversity of the local contexts where the MNE is active in a first period may therefore discourage adding further cultural distance. We test the hypothesized relationships using a panel of 91 German companies.

"Ever-growing Amman", Jordan: Urban expansion, social polarisation and contemporary urban planning issues

Amman the primate capital city of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan currently has a population in excess of 2 million, but in 1924 it consisted of little more than a collection of dwellings and some 2000-3000 inhabitants. The present paper sets out to document and explain the phenomenal expansion of "ever-growing Amman". The physical geography of the urban region and the early growth of the city are considered at the outset and this leads directly to consideration of the highly polarised social structuring that characterises contemporary Amman. In doing this, original data derived from the recent Greater Amman Municipality's Geographical Information System are presented. In this respect, the essential modernity of the city is exemplified. The employment and industrial bases of the city and a range of pressing contemporary issues are then considered, including transport and congestion, the provision of urban water under conditions of water stress and privatisation, and urban and regional development planning for the city. The paper concludes by emphasizing the growing regional and international geopolitical salience of the city of Amman at the start of the 21st century. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A differential thermal expansion approach to crystal structure determination from powder diffraction data

Differential thermal expansion over the range 90-210 K has been applied successfully to determine the crystal structure of chlorothiazide from synchrotron powder diffraction data using direct methods. Key to the success of the approach is the use of a multi-data-set Pawley refinement to extract a set of reflection intensities that is more 'single-crystal-like' than those extracted from a single data set. The improvement in reflection intensity estimates is quantified by comparison with reference single-crystal intensities. (C) 2008 International Union of Crystallography Printed in Singapore - all rights reserved

Foreword: International Space Science Institute (ISSI) workshop on the Earth’s cryosphere and sea level change

Rising sea level is perhaps the most severe consequence of climate warming, as much of the world’s population and infrastructure is located near current sea level (Lemke et al. 2007). A major rise of a metre or more would cause serious problems. Such possibilities have been suggested by Hansen and Sato (2011) who pointed out that sea level was several metres higher than now during the Holsteinian and Eemian interglacials (about 250,000 and 120,000 years ago, respectively), even though the global temperature was then only slightly higher than it is nowadays. It is consequently of the utmost importance to determine whether such a sea level rise could occur and, if so, how fast it might happen. Sea level undergoes considerable changes due to natural processes such as the wind, ocean currents and tidal motions. On longer time scales, the sea level is influenced by steric effects (sea water expansion caused by temperature and salinity changes of the ocean) and by eustatic effects caused by changes in ocean mass. Changes in the Earth’s cryosphere, such as the retreat or expansion of glaciers and land ice areas, have been the dominant cause of sea level change during the Earth’s recent history. During the glacial cycles of the last million years, the sea level varied by a large amount, of the order of 100 m. If the Earth’s cryosphere were to disappear completely, the sea level would rise by some 65 m. The scientific papers in the present volume address the different aspects of the Earth’s cryosphere and how the different changes in the cryosphere affect sea level change. It represents the outcome of the first workshop held within the new ISSI Earth Science Programme. The workshop took place from 22 to 26 March, 2010, in Bern, Switzerland, with the objective of providing an in-depth insight into the future of mountain glaciers and the large land ice areas of Antarctica and Greenland, which are exposed to natural and anthropogenic climate influences, and their effects on sea level change. The participants of the workshop are experts in different fields including meteorology, climatology, oceanography, glaciology and geodesy; they use advanced space-based observational studies and state-of-the-art numerical modelling.

Expansion quality of epidemic protocols

Epidemic protocols are a bio-inspired communication and computation paradigm for large and extreme-scale networked systems. This work investigates the expansion property of the network overlay topologies induced by epidemic protocols. An expansion quality index for overlay topologies is proposed and adopted for the design of epidemic membership protocols. A novel protocol is proposed, which explicitly aims at improving the expansion quality of the overlay topologies. The proposed protocol is tested with a global aggregation task and compared to other membership protocols. The analysis by means of simulations indicates that the expansion quality directly relates to the speed of dissemination and convergence of epidemic protocols and can be effectively used to design better protocols.