Marketing strategy : making sense of industry dynamics:is there still value in strategic group research?

This paper looks selectively at strategic group theory and seeks to explore the benefits and limitations of modern strategic group analysis within the context of practical strategy making in the pharmaceutical industry. The rise and fall of strategic group research is reviewed and suggestions advanced as to the reasons why strategic group research suffered criticism and frequently produced conflicting results. The paper concludes that strategic group research offers a valuable way to classify firms by their strategy and provides some suggestions as to how industry strategists may benefit from strategic group analysis and avoid the pitfalls exposed by previous research.

Making sense of violence: a study of narrative meaning

Dramatized violence has been a feature of entertainment in western civilization throughout history. The function of film violence is explored and compared to violence encountered in real life. The role of narrative in individuals' meaning-making processes is also investigated. Six adults were individually interviewed using a semi-structured schedule and narrative analysis was implemented. The findings revealed that real life violence is experientially distinct from film violence but narrative was found to be central to participants' quest for the meaning of violence in both contexts. The narrative framework of violence and whether it is justifiable were fundamental to participants' understanding. The function of violent film was found to be multifaceted: it can teach viewers about the consequences of violence; it allows them to speculate about their own and others' reactions to violence; and it provides an opportunity to experience something which is ordinarily outside of our experience in order to satisfy our human existential needs.

Making Sense of Home and Homeland: Former-Soviet Greeks' Motivations and Strategies for a Transnational Migrant Circuit

Focusing on former-Soviet Greeks' experiences of cross-border movement to Greece, this paper sheds light on the impact of this migration on the social identities of Russian Greeks as a transnational community. It draws on informants’ narratives and ethnographic observations recorded among Greek migrants in their home communities in southern Russia, and shows how their motivation, in their transnational movement, is determined by the ‘push-and-pull’ forces of socio-economic and political transformations in post-Soviet space. In these conditions, Greek identity becomes a resource which facilitates the organisation of transnational migration. The cultural, social and economic differences between the former-Soviet Greek migrants and the native-born population of Greece result in the emergence of a Pontic-Greek cultural identity which emphasises migrants’ connections with the former USSR. The difficulties of economic and cultural adaptation for migrants to Greece are examined in relation to the Russian Greeks' economic strategies within their home communities and their perception of the ‘homeland’ as a constantly contested and relocated social construct.

Making sense of microposts (#MSM2013) concept extraction challenge

Microposts are small fragments of social media content that have been published using a lightweight paradigm (e.g. Tweets, Facebook likes, foursquare check-ins). Microposts have been used for a variety of applications (e.g., sentiment analysis, opinion mining, trend analysis), by gleaning useful information, often using third-party concept extraction tools. There has been very large uptake of such tools in the last few years, along with the creation and adoption of new methods for concept extraction. However, the evaluation of such efforts has been largely consigned to document corpora (e.g. news articles), questioning the suitability of concept extraction tools and methods for Micropost data. This report describes the Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (#MSM2013) Concept Extraction Challenge, hosted in conjunction with the 2013 World Wide Web conference (WWW'13). The Challenge dataset comprised a manually annotated training corpus of Microposts and an unlabelled test corpus. Participants were set the task of engineering a concept extraction system for a defined set of concepts. Out of a total of 22 complete submissions 13 were accepted for presentation at the workshop; the submissions covered methods ranging from sequence mining algorithms for attribute extraction to part-of-speech tagging for Micropost cleaning and rule-based and discriminative models for token classification. In this report we describe the evaluation process and explain the performance of different approaches in different contexts.

Making sense of the ‘difficult’ past:transmission of political heritage and memory-work among young people across Europe

This article considers young people’s socialization into mnemonic communities in 14 European countries. It argues that such socialization is an intersubjective and selective process that, to a great degree, depends on the particular social environment that conditions the discourses on pasts available to young people. Drawing on memory studies, it recognizes memory as a valid alternative to the institutionalized past (history) but envisages the two as inextricably connected. Given this, it identifies several strategies adopted by young people in order to socialize understandings of the past. While these strategies vary, some reveal receptivity to populist and far right ideologies. Our study demonstrates how internalization of political heritage via mnemonic socialization within families is conditioned by both the national political agenda and socio-economic situation experienced across Europe.

Towards an integrative theory of religion and politics

In the social sciences, debate on the relationship between religion and politics is mainly the subject of analysis in the sociology of religion and the theory of international relations. While each of these fields promotes different approaches to study their interdependency. The individual's perception of religion and politics is neglected by current research. The faithful, who participates in religious ceremonies, listening and behaving according to specific religious teachings, actively engaging in the liturgical life of the institutional form of his religion, has a specific way of understanding the relationship between religion and politics. I argue that this aspect is under-researched and misrepresented in the literature of sociology and international relations. However, a more complex analysis is offered by the study of nationalism, and especially by its ethnosymbolic approach, which includes at the micro and macro societal level the presence of myths and symbols as part of the individual's and the nation's life. An integrative theory analysing the connection between religion and politics takes into account the role of myths and symbols from the perspectives of both individuals and ethnic communities.

Sense of coherence and diabetes:a prospective occupational cohort

Background: Sense of coherence (SOC) is an individual characteristic related to a positive life orientation leading to effective coping. A weak SOC has been associated with indicators of general morbidity and mortality. However, the relationship between SOC and diabetes has not been studied in prospective design. The present study prospectively examined the relationship between a weak SOC and the incidence of diabetes. Methods: The relationship between a weak SOC and the incidence of diabetes was investigated among 5827 Finnish male employees aged 18–65 at baseline (1986). SOC was measured by questionnaire survey at baseline. Data on prescription diabetes drugs from 1987 to 2004 were obtained from the Drug Imbursement Register held by the Social Insurance Institution. Results: During the follow-up, 313 cases of diabetes were recorded. A weak SOC was associated with a 46% higher risk of diabetes in participants who had been =<50 years of age on entry into the study. This association was independent of age, education, marital status, psychological distress, self-rated health, smoking status, binge drinking and physical activity. No similar association was observed in older employees. Conclusion: The results suggest that besides focusing on well-known risk factors for diabetes, strengthening SOC in employees of =<50 years of age can also play a role in attempts to tackle increasing rates of diabetes.

'Girls who do Boys like they’re girls'? Exploring the role of gender in the junior management of contemporary service work

This article attempts to explain the clustering of women managers at junior managerial grades in the service sector by focusing on the structuring and organization of work in a call centre. The article is based on an ethnography of an organization and seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate in gender research by exploring and documenting the requirement for the enactment of masculinities at work for successful managers. Central to our account is the role of team leader which, as a junior management position, occupies a key role in understanding and accounting for the gendered hierarchical terrain of contemporary service-based organizations. In exploring the role of team leader, a position that tends overwhelmingly to be held by female staff, we draw attention to the perception of the gendered nature of the role by subordinate members of the organization, the team-leaders themselves and more senior managers. The position is also brought into sharp relief in comparison with the subordinate role of the ‘problem manager’, a position overwhelmingly held by men.

Making political films politically?:the film-making practice of Jean-Luc Godard

This thesis attempts to re-examine the work of Jean-Luc Godard and in particular the claims which have been made for it as the starting-point for a revolutionary cinema.This re-examination involves, firstly, a critical summary of the development of Structuralist thinking, from its origins in linguistics, with Saussure, through to its influence on Marxism, with Althusser. It is this `Structural Marxism' which prepared the ground for a view of Godard as a revolutionary film-maker so its influences on film theory in the decade after 1968 is traced in journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Screen and in the work of their editors and contributors. Godard's relationship with such theories was a complex one and some of the cross-breeding is revealed in a brief account of his own ideas about his film-making. More important, however is his practice as a committed `political' film-maker between 1968 and 1972 which is analysed in terms of the responses it makes to the cultural opportunities offered in the period after the revolutionary situation of May 1968. The severe problems revealed by that analysis may be partially resolved in Godard's greatest `political' achievement Tout va bien, but a comparative analysis proves that in earlier `a-political' films such as Vivre sa vie, he was creating more meaningful and perhaps even more revolutionary art, whose formal experimentation is more organically linked to its subject and whose ability to communicate ideas far oustrips the later work. In conclusion some indications are suggested of a more fruitful basis for Marxist theories of art than Structural variants, seeking a non-formalist approach in the work of Marx, of Trotsky, of Brecht and Lukacs.

Show bizz becomes show buzz:how viral diffusion changes the traditional meaning-making process of a rising star

Studying the case of a young French rapper called Kamini, the authors show how the viral diffusion of a new creative product, such as a song, radically changes traditional meaning-making processes. Instead of the top-down approach in which product positioning is carefully constructed and transferred to consumers, marketers are faced with a bottom-up trend in which consumers increasingly participate in blogs and online forums to talk about products (thus, creating and diffusing meaning) before any marketing action is undertaken. Our study aims to understand the interactions and tensions between market forces that result from this pro-active role of the consumer.

Marine Le Pen and the 'New' FN:a change of style or of substance?

The electoral challenge of the far right is an enduringly problematic feature of contemporary French politics. In the first rounds of the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections, the Front National (FN) under new leader Marine Le Pen attracted a combined total of ten million votes, bringing its ultra-nationalist policies to the centre of national political debate. This article examines the FN's impact on these elections and its implications for French politics. Drawing on official FN programmes, detailed election results and a range of opinion polling data, it assesses the strength of support for Le Pen and her party and seeks to explain their electoral appeal. In particular, it subjects to analysis the claim that the new leader has ‘de-demonised’ the FN, transforming it from perennial outsider to normal participant in mainstream French politics; and it reflects on the strategic dilemma posed for the centre-right by this newly invigorated far-right challenge.

'Listen to my madness':understanding the experiences of people with serious mental illness

This article explores the salience of disability theory for understanding the experiences of people with serious mental illness. Drawing on data from a focus group study, we suggest that users experience both impairment (as embodied irrationality) which can, in itself, be oppressive, and also have to manage their lives within a largely disabling society. We outline some of the strategies adopted by users to manage their situation and ensure they access and receive health services, and illustrate how these are a result of the complex relationship between disability and impairment. We suggest that using a framework of the social model of disability provides a useful way of understanding and making sense of the experience of users with serious mental illness. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd/Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness 2005.

Who is really in charge of contemporary education? People and technologies in, against and beyond the neoliberal university

This article reflects on the position of people in, against and beyond information and communication technologies. Firstly, using Jandrić and Kuzmanić’s work on digital postcolonialism, Raymond Williams's work on residual and emergent cultures, and Deleuze and Guattari's insights into the dynamics between territorialization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization, it develops a theoretical framework for inquiry into the hybrid identity of the contemporary university. Then, through critical discourse analysis (CDA), the article moves on to analyse the ways in which technology discourse resides in the dominating ideology of technological determinism and co-opts with neoliberal agendas by omitting humans from explicit mention in UK policy documents. It shows that true counter-hegemonic practice against dominating social practices is possible only through reinvigorating the central position of human beings in regards to information and communication technologies. Within the developed theoretical framework, it seeks openings to intervene subversively into current relationships between technologies, people, and (higher) education, and to identify opportunities for building a non-determinist identity of the contemporary university that reaches beyond the single-minded logic of techno-scientific development. In the process, it situates Paulo Freire's insights into critical pedagogy in the context of the network society, and places the relationships between human beings, language and information and communication technologies amongst central questions of today's (higher) education and society at large.