Doing business in India

On its independence in 1947, India was among the two most industrialized nations in Asia. Since then it adopted a “mixed economy” approach that hindered its national growth and the optimum utilization of its immense resources (both natural and human). To re-establish itself as an economic force in the region, India liberalized its economy in early 1990s. The adoption of the “free market economy” model has created great opportunities for foreign businesses. This article provides useful information on the complex business environment, aimed to help foreign businessmen and investors to develop a good understanding on key background knowledge for being successful in India. It reviews Indian historical development, political structure and climate, international relations, and economy and foreign trade. India's infrastructure, legal framework, socio-cultural set-up, competitive environment, as well as market structure and potential are also analyzed. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Doing business in... Indonesia

Indonesia's long stability of over three decades came to a sudden end after the regional economic crisis of 1997–1998. The economic crisis not only shattered the Indonesian economy but also resulted in political turmoil. The national leadership has changed three times over the last five years. In such conditions, the confidence of foreign investors is very low. The present government has initiated a number of steps to restore political stability and economic recovery. This article provides useful information on the complex business environment, aimed to help foreign investors to develop a good understanding on key background knowledge for being successful in Indonesia. It reviews Indonesian historical development, political structure and climate, regional relations, and economy and foreign trade. Indonesia's infrastructure, legal framework, sociocultural setup, as well as market structure and potential, are also analyzed.

Doing business in... Sri Lanka

Having a well-developed human resource base and a relatively well-developed capital market infrastructure, Sri Lanka offers a liberal and dynamic investment environment. Over the years, macrostability has been achieved and considerable reforms have been implemented, contributing to a healthy economic growth. This article provides useful information on the business environment and is intended to help foreign businessmen and investors to develop a good grasp of essential background knowledge for being successful in Sri Lanka. It reviews the Sri Lankan political structure, climate, and economy. Sri Lanka's infrastructure, legal framework, and socioculturel set-up, as well as market structure and potential, are also analyzed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Understanding mobile phone usage while driving:mini-bus and taxi drivers' experiences in Istanbul

In emerging markets, the amount of mobile communication and the number of occasions mobile phones are used are increasing. More and more settings appropriate or not for mobile phone usage are being exposed. Although prohibited by many governments, there is evidence that use of new mobile devices while driving are somehow becoming current everyday practice, hence legitimatizing usage for many users. Dominant dangerous behavior in the absence of enforced legal framework is being deployed and has become routine for many m-users. This chapter adopts a qualitative case study approach (20 cases) to examine the public transport drivers' motives, logic and legitimacy processes. The question which these issues raise in the light of advancing m-technologies is: How do, in the context of emerging market, undesired emerging routines enactment get to be reflected upon and voluntarily disregarded to maximize the benefits of m-technologies while minimizing their drawbacks? Findings point out at multiple motives for usage including external social pressure through the ubiquitous 24/7 usage of mtechnology, lack of alternative communication protocol, real time need for action and from an internal perspectives boredoms, lack of danger awareness, blurring of the boundaries between personal and business life and lack of job fulfillment are uncovered as key factors. As secondary dynamic factors such as education, drivers work' histories, impunity, lack of strong consumer opposition appear central in shaping the development of the routines. © 2011, IGI Global.

Privatization : problems of implementation in Egypt

This study aims to investigate to what extent the views of the managers of the enterprises to be privatized are a barrier to smooth implementation of privatization as opposed to other problems. Accordingly, the research tackles two main issues: Identification and analysis of the major problems encountered in the implementation of the Egyptian privatization programme and at which level these problems exist while proposing different approaches to tackle them; and views of public sector top and middle-level managers regarding the main issues of privatization. The study relies upon a literature survey, interviews with stakeholders, a survey of managers' attitudes and several illustrative case studies. A model of "good practice" for the smooth and effective implementation of privatization has been designed. Practice in Egypt has then been studied and compared with the "good practice" model. Lack of strictness and firmness in implementing the announced privatization programme has been found to be a characteristic of Egyptian practice. This is partly attributable to the inadequacy of the programme and partly to the different obstacles to implementation. The main obstacles are doubtful desirability of privatization on the part of the managers at different implementation levels, resistance of stakeholders, in adequately of the legal framework governing privatization, redundant labour, lack of an efficient monitoring system allowing for accountability, inefficient marketing of privatization, ineffective communication, insufficient information at different levels and problems related to valuation and selling procedures. A large part of the thesis is concerned with SOE (State Owned Enterprise) managers' attitudes on and understanding of the privatization (appraised through surveys). Although most managers have stated their acceptance of privatization, many of their responses show that they do not accept selling SOEs. They understand privatization to include enterprise reform and restructuring, changing procedures and giving more authority to company executives, but not necessarily as selling SOEs. The majority of managers still see many issues that have to be addressed for smooth implementation of privatization e.g. insufficiency of information, incompleteness of legal framework, restructuring and labour problems. The main contribution to knowledge of this thesis is the study of problems of implementing privatization in developing countries especially managers' resistance to privatization as a major change, partly because of the threat it poses and partly because of the lack of understanding of privatization and implications of operating private businesses. A programme of persuading managers and offsetting the unfavourable effects is recommended as an outcome of the study. Five different phrases and words for the national Index to theses are: Egypt, privatization, implementation of privatization, problems of implementing privatization and managers' attitudes towards privatization.

“I didn’t mean to steal someone else’s words!”:a forensic linguistic approach to detecting intentional plagiarism

The concept of plagiarism is not uncommonly associated with the concept of intellectual property, both for historical and legal reasons: the approach to the ownership of ‘moral’, nonmaterial goods has evolved to the right to individual property, and consequently a need was raised to establish a legal framework to cope with the infringement of those rights. The solution to plagiarism therefore falls most often under two categories: ethical and legal. On the ethical side, education and intercultural studies have addressed plagiarism critically, not only as a means to improve academic ethics policies (PlagiarismAdvice.org, 2008), but mainly to demonstrate that if anything the concept of plagiarism is far from being universal (Howard & Robillard, 2008). Even if differently, Howard (1995) and Scollon (1994, 1995) argued, and Angèlil-Carter (2000) and Pecorari (2008) later emphasised that the concept of plagiarism cannot be studied on the grounds that one definition is clearly understandable by everyone. Scollon (1994, 1995), for example, claimed that authorship attribution is particularly a problem in non-native writing in English, and so did Pecorari (2008) in her comprehensive analysis of academic plagiarism. If among higher education students plagiarism is often a problem of literacy, with prior, conflicting social discourses that may interfere with academic discourse, as Angèlil-Carter (2000) demonstrates, we then have to aver that a distinction should be made between intentional and inadvertent plagiarism: plagiarism should be prosecuted when intentional, but if it is part of the learning process and results from the plagiarist’s unfamiliarity with the text or topic it should be considered ‘positive plagiarism’ (Howard, 1995: 796) and hence not an offense. Determining the intention behind the instances of plagiarism therefore determines the nature of the disciplinary action adopted. Unfortunately, in order to demonstrate the intention to deceive and charge students with accusations of plagiarism, teachers necessarily have to position themselves as ‘plagiarism police’, although it has been argued otherwise (Robillard, 2008). Practice demonstrates that in their daily activities teachers will find themselves being required a command of investigative skills and tools that they most often lack. We thus claim that the ‘intention to deceive’ cannot inevitably be dissociated from plagiarism as a legal issue, even if Garner (2009) asserts that generally plagiarism is immoral but not illegal, and Goldstein (2003) makes the same severance. However, these claims, and the claim that only cases of copyright infringement tend to go to court, have recently been challenged, mainly by forensic linguists, who have been actively involved in cases of plagiarism. Turell (2008), for instance, demonstrated that plagiarism is often connoted with an illegal appropriation of ideas. Previously, she (Turell, 2004) had demonstrated by comparison of four translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Spanish that the use of linguistic evidence is able to demonstrate instances of plagiarism. This challenge is also reinforced by practice in international organisations, such as the IEEE, to whom plagiarism potentially has ‘severe ethical and legal consequences’ (IEEE, 2006: 57). What plagiarism definitions used by publishers and organisations have in common – and which the academia usually lacks – is their focus on the legal nature. We speculate that this is due to the relation they intentionally establish with copyright laws, whereas in education the focus tends to shift from the legal to the ethical aspects. However, the number of plagiarism cases taken to court is very small, and jurisprudence is still being developed on the topic. In countries within the Civil Law tradition, Turell (2008) claims, (forensic) linguists are seldom called upon as expert witnesses in cases of plagiarism, either because plagiarists are rarely taken to court or because there is little tradition of accepting linguistic evidence. In spite of the investigative and evidential potential of forensic linguistics to demonstrate the plagiarist’s intention or otherwise, this potential is restricted by the ability to identify a text as being suspect of plagiarism. In an era with such a massive textual production, ‘policing’ plagiarism thus becomes an extraordinarily difficult task without the assistance of plagiarism detection systems. Although plagiarism detection has attracted the attention of computer engineers and software developers for years, a lot of research is still needed. Given the investigative nature of academic plagiarism, plagiarism detection has of necessity to consider not only concepts of education and computational linguistics, but also forensic linguistics. Especially, if intended to counter claims of being a ‘simplistic response’ (Robillard & Howard, 2008). In this paper, we use a corpus of essays written by university students who were accused of plagiarism, to demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of improper paraphrasing in suspect texts has the potential to identify and provide evidence of intention. A linguistic analysis of the corpus texts shows that the plagiarist acts on the paradigmatic axis to replace relevant lexical items with a related word from the same semantic field, i.e. a synonym, a subordinate, a superordinate, etc. In other words, relevant lexical items were replaced with related, but not identical, ones. Additionally, the analysis demonstrates that the word order is often changed intentionally to disguise the borrowing. On the other hand, the linguistic analysis of linking and explanatory verbs (i.e. referencing verbs) and prepositions shows that these have the potential to discriminate instances of ‘patchwriting’ and instances of plagiarism. This research demonstrates that the referencing verbs are borrowed from the original in an attempt to construct the new text cohesively when the plagiarism is inadvertent, and that the plagiarist has made an effort to prevent the reader from identifying the text as plagiarism, when it is intentional. In some of these cases, the referencing elements prove being able to identify direct quotations and thus ‘betray’ and denounce plagiarism. Finally, we demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of these verbs is critical to allow detection software to identify them as proper paraphrasing and not – mistakenly and simplistically – as plagiarism.