Role of financial and other information in trade credit decisions in SMEs: An international study

Trade credit is an important source of finance for SMEs and this study investigates the use of the financial statements and other information in making trade credit decisions in smaller entities in Finland, the UK, USA and South Africa. The study adds to the literature by examining the information needs of unincorporated entities as a basis for making comparisons with small, unlisted companies. In-depth, semi-structured interviews in each country were used to collect data from the owner-managers of SMEs and from credit rating agencies and credit insurers. The findings provide insights into similarities and differences between countries and between developed and developing economies. The evidence suggests that there are three main influences on the trade credit decision: formal and report-based information, soft information relating to social capital and contingency factors. The latter dictate the extent to which hard/formal information versus soft/informal information is used.

Sistemas sociais comunitários e uso de recursos naturais : bases para políticas públicas e desenvolvimento territorial no estado do Pará

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Centro de Desenvolvimento Sustentável, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Desenvolvimento Sustentável, 2016.

Social Trust and Demand for Redistribution. Is There a Crowding out Effect?

The debate about the relationship between social capital the welfare state has produced contradictory results for a long time. The crowding out hypothesis states that the growth of the welfare state would erode social capital, as the action of the state leave no room for non-regulated spontaneous cooperation. In sharp contrast, the crowding in hypothesis states that there is virtuous circle between the size of the welfare state and the stock of social capital in a particular country, since generous welfare states (specially those relying on universalistic programs) will produce a particular sense of fairness and solidarity toward fellow citizens. Yet, the empirical evidence testing the explanatory power of these theories is mostly inconclusive. To further our knowledge of this puzzle, in this paper I focus specifically on the relationship between social trust and preferences for redistribution at the individual level in a sample of European countries belonging to different welfare state regimes.

An Analysis of the Factors that Influence Regional Economic Development Cooperation

This dissertation is a comparative case study of regional cooperation in the field of economic development. In the 21st century global economy, proponents of regionalism have put forth fresh arguments for collective action. A regional approach to economic development activity presents a classic social dilemma: How can local officials collectively improve the economic prospects of a region, and remain autonomous to act in the best interest of the local community? This research examines the role of social capital in overcoming this social dilemma. Three (3) comparable Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) form the empirical basis of this research. The Houston MSA, the Atlanta MSA and the Miami MSA present distinct variations of regionalized economic development activity. This dissertation seeks to explain this disparity in the dependent variable. The hypothesis is that accrued social capital is crucial to obtaining economic development cooperative agreements. This qualitative research utilized secondary demographic and economic databases, survey instruments, interviews, field observations, and a review of legislative and administrative decisions to formulate a clear understanding of the factors influencing the current state of regional economic development cooperation within each region. The study concludes that the legislative and executive decisions of state government exert inordinate influence on the capacity of local officials to cooperate regionally for economic development purposes.

Public service motivation in public and nonprofit service providers: The cases of Belarus and Poland

The work motivation construct is central to the theory and practice of many social science disciplines. Yet, due to the novelty of validated measures appropriate for a deep cross-national comparison, studies that contrast different administrative regimes remain scarce. This study represents an initial empirical effort to validate the Public Service Motivation (PSM) instrument proposed by Kim and colleagues (2013) in a previously unstudied context. The two former communist countries analyzed in this dissertation—Belarus and Poland—followed diametrically opposite development strategies: a fully decentralized administrative regime in Poland and a highly centralized regime in Belarus. The employees (n = 677) of public and nonprofit organizations in the border regions of Podlaskie Wojewodstwo (Poland) and Hrodna Voblasc (Belarus) are the subjects of study. ^ Confirmatory factor analysis revealed three dimensions of public service motivation in the two regions: compassion, self-sacrifice, and attraction to public service. The statistical models tested in this dissertation suggest that nonprofit sector employees exhibit higher levels of PSM than their public sector counterparts. Nonprofit sector employees also reveal a similar set of values and work attitudes across the countries. Thus, the study concludes that in terms of PSM, employees of nonprofit organizations constitute a homogenous group that exists atop the administrative regimes. ^ However, the findings propose significant differences between public sector agencies across the two countries. Contrary to expectations, data suggest that organization centralization in Poland is equal to—or for some items even higher than—that of Belarus. We can conclude that the absence of administrative decentralization of service provision in a country does not necessarily undermine decentralized practices within organizations. Further analysis reveals strong correlations between organization centralization and PSM for the Polish sample. Meanwhile, in Belarus, correlations between organization centralization items and PSM are weak and mostly insignificant. ^ The analysis indicates other factors beyond organization centralization that significantly impact PSM in both sectors. PSM of the employees in the studied region is highly correlated with their participation in religious practices, political parties, or labor unions as well as location of their organization in a capital and type of social service provided.^

Book review: Laurel Kamada, Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being Half in Japan. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2010

Arguably, the catalyst for the best research studies using social analysis of discourse is personal ‘lived’ experience. This is certainly the case for Kamada, who, as a white American woman with a Japanese spouse, had to deal first hand with the racialization of her son. Like many other mixed-ethnic parents, she experienced the shock and disap-pointment of finding her child being racialized as ‘Chinese’ in America through peer group taunts, and constituted as gaijin (a foreigner) in his own homeland of Japan. As a member of an e-list of the (Japan) Bilingualism Special Interest Group (BSIG), Kamada learnt that other parents from the English-speaking foreign community in Japan had similar disturbing stories to tell of their mixed-ethnic children who, upon entering the Japanese school system, were mocked, bullied and marginalized by their peers. She men-tions a pervasive Japanese proverb which warns of diversity or difference getting squashed: ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down’. This imperative to conform to Japanese behavioural and discursive norms prompted Kamada’s quest to investigate the impact of ‘otherization’ on the identities of children of mixed parentage. In this fascinat-ing book, she shows that this pressure to conform is balanced by a corresponding cele-bration of ‘hybrid’ or mixed identities. The children in her study are also able to negotiate their identities positively as they come to terms with contradictory discursive notions of ‘Japaneseness’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘halfness/doubleness’.The discursive construction of identity has become a central concern amongst researchers across a wide range of academic disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences, and most existing work either concentrates on a specific identity cate-gory, such as gender, sexuality or national identity, or else offers a broader discussion of how identity is theorized. Kamada’s book is refreshing because it crosses the usual boundaries and offers divergent insights on identity in a number of ways. First, using the term ‘ethno-gendering’, she examines the ways in which six mixed-ethnic girls living in Japan accomplish and manage the relationship between their gender and ethnic ‘differ-ences’ from age 12 to 15. She analyses in close detail how their actions or displays within certain situated interactions might come into conflict with how they are seen or constituted by others. Second, Kamada’s study builds on contemporary writing on the benefits of hybridity where identities are fluid, flexible and indeterminate, and which contest the usual monolithic distinctions of gender, ethnicity, class, etc. Here, Kamada carves out an original space for her findings. While scholars have often investigated changing identities and language practices of young people who have been geographi-cally displaced and are newcomers to the local language, Kamada’s participants were all born and brought up in Japan, were fluent in Japanese and were relatively proficient in English. Third, the author refuses to conceptualize or theorize identity from a single given viewpoint in preference to others, but in postmodernist spirit draws upon multiple perspectives and frameworks of discourse analysis in order to create different forms of knowledge and understandings of her subject. Drawing on this ‘multi-perspectival’ approach, Kamada examines grammatical, lexical, rhetorical and interactional features from six extensive conversations, to show how her participants position their diverse identities in relation to their friends, to the researcher and to the outside world. Kamada’s study is driven by three clear aims. The first is to find out ‘whether there are any tensions and dilemmas in the ways adolescent girls of Japanese and “white” mixed parentage in Japan identify themselves in terms of ethnicity’. In Chapter 4, she shows how the girls indeed felt that they stood out as different and consequently experienced isolation, marginalization and bullying at school – although they were able to make better sense of this as they grew older, repositioning the bullies as pitiable. The second aim is to ask how, if at all, her participants celebrate their ethnicity, and furthermore, what kind of symbolic, linguistic and social capital they were able to claim for themselves on the basis of their hybrid identities. In Chapter 5, Kamada shows how the girls over time were able to constitute themselves as insiders while constituting ‘the Japanese’ as outsiders, and their network of mixed-ethnic friends was a key means to achieve this. In Chapter 6, the author develops this potential celebration of the girls’ mixed ethnicity by investigating the privileges they perceived it afforded them – for example, having the advantage of pos-sessing English proficiency and intercultural ‘savvy’ in a globalized world. Kamada’s third aim is to ask how her participants positioned themselves and performed their hybrid identities on the basis of their constituted appearance: that is, how the girls saw them-selves based on how they looked to others. In Chapter 7, the author shows that, while there are competing discourses at work, the girls are able to take up empowering positions within a discourse of ‘foreigner attractiveness’ or ‘a white-Western female beauty’ discourse, which provides them with a certain cachet among their Japanese peers. Throughout the book, Kamada adopts a highly self-reflexive perspective of her own position as author. For example, she interrogates the fact that she may have changed the lived reality of her six participants during the course of her research study. As the six girls, who were ‘best friends’, lived in different parts of the Morita region of Japan, she had to be proactive in organizing six separate ‘get-togethers’ through the course of her three-year study. She acknowledges that she did not collect ‘naturally occurring data’ but rather co-constructed opportunities for the girls to meet and talk on a regular basis. At these meetings, she encouraged the girls to discuss matters of identity, prompted by open-ended interview questions, by stimulus materials such as photos, articles and pic-tures, and by individual tasks such as drawing self-portraits. By giving her participants a platform in this way, Kamada not only elicited some very rich spoken data but also ‘helped in some way to shape the attitudes and self-images of the girls positively, in ways that might not have developed had these get-togethers not occurred’ (p. 221). While the data she gathers are indeed rich, it may well be asked whether there is a mismatch between the girls’ frank and engaging accounts of personal experience, and the social constructionist academic register in which these are later re-articulated. When Kamada writes, ‘Rina related how within the more narrow range of discourses that she had to draw on in her past, she was disempowered and marginalized’ (p. 118), we know that Rina’s actual words were very different. Would she really recognize, understand and agree with the reported speech of the researcher? This small omission of self-reflexivity apart – an omission which is true of most lin-guistic ethnography conducted today – Kamada has written a unique, engaging and thought-provoking book which offers a model to future discourse analysts investigating hybrid identities. The idea that speakers can draw upon competing discourses or reper-toires to constitute their identities in contrasting, creative and positive ways provides linguistic researchers with a clear orientation by which to analyse the contradictions of identity construction as they occur across time in different discursive contexts

NEIGHBORHOOD PERCEPTION OF SAFETY AND THE MOBILITY GAP BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN IN OLD AGE

Thesis (Master, Community Health & Epidemiology) -- Queen's University, 2016-10-02 21:02:07.735

Entrepreneurship: a long way to go

Entrepreneurship education has emerged as one popular research domain in academic fields given its aim at enhancing and developing certain entrepreneurial qualities of undergraduates that change their state of behavior, even their entrepreneurial inclination and finally may result in the formation of new businesses as well as new job opportunities. This study attempts to investigate the Colombian student´s entrepreneurial qualities and the influence of entrepreneurial education during their studies.

Accidentes de trabajo e índice de masa corporal en vigilantes atendidos en una I.P.S. de salud ocupacional, Bogotá - Colombia, 2015

INTRODUCCIÓN: Todos los individuos dentro de una sociedad tienen derecho a disfrutar de una integridad física, mental y de sus bienes materiales, que en principio debe ser garantizada por el Estado, sin embargo, debido a la ineficacia y falta de alcance en la disponibilidad de hombres y mujeres para cuidar a cada persona y empresa, la Seguridad Privada ha surgido como actividad económica para garantizar éste servicio de manera individualizada. No obstante a ello, poco se sabe acerca de las características de las personas que desempeñan ésta labor, así como las demandas inherentes a ésta actividad económica; sin embargo, en poblaciones económicamente similares, se documenta a través de la literatura la aparente relación entre la condición física del individuo y la presentación de accidentes de trabajo. OBJETIVO: Establecer la relación entre los accidentes de trabajo y el índice de masa corporal (IMC) en vigilantes atendidos en una I.P.S. de Salud Ocupacional en la ciudad de Bogotá-Colombia, durante el año 2015. MATERIALES Y MÉTODOS: Se llevó a cabo un estudio de corte transversal, con datos secundarios de una base de datos de 76 registros, procedentes de las historias clínicas médico ocupacionales realizadas a una población de trabajadores del sector de la Vigilancia o Seguridad Privada, durante su atención en una Institución Prestadora de Salud (I.P.S.) de Salud Ocupacional. Se incluyeron variables sociodemográficas, ocupacionales, las relacionadas con los accidentes de trabajo y el índice de masa corporal. Se obtuvieron las frecuencias univariadas y para las variables de tipo cuantitativo, medidas de tendencia central y dispersión, además de buscar potenciales asociaciones estadísticas, para conocer las variables que se relacionan con el evento estudiado. RESULTADOS: En éste proyecto se destaca que de los trabajadores que desempeñan la actividad económica de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada, se encuentran en el grupo de 20 a 39 años (56.5%) y pertenecen al género masculino (84.2%); dichos factores contribuyen a la ocurrencia de los accidentes de trabajo (OR de 1.7 y 2.0 respectivamente). Además el I.M.C. de sobrepeso (OR 1.8), la obesidad (OR 1.4); y en sí el cargo de Vigilante concurren a la accidentalidad laboral (OR de 1.1) y con ello al incremento de incapacidad laboral en un 85.5% de 0 a 60 días. CONCLUSIONES: Se deben establecer medidas encaminadas al emprendimiento de sistemas de vigilancia epidemiológica que mitiguen y minimicen el riesgo, con ello la presencia de eventos no deseados en el ámbito laboral para ésta población y la disminución del ausentismo laboral.

Challenging 'best practice' subtropical design

Genuine sustainability would require that urban development provide net positive social and ecological gains to compensate for previous lost natural capital and carrying capacity. Thus far, green buildings do not contribute to net sustainability. While they reduce relative resource consumption, they consume vast quantities of materials, energy and water.i Moreover, they replace land and ecosystems with structures that, at best, ‘mimic’ ecosystems. Elsewhere, the author has proposed a‘sustainability standard’, where development would leave the ecology, as well as society, better off after construction than before.ii To meet this standard, a development would need to add natural and social capital beyond what existed prior to development. Positive DesignTM or Positive DevelopmentTM is that which expands both the ecological base (life support system) and the public estate (equitable access to means of survival). How to achieve this is discussed in Positive Development (Birkeland 2008). This paper examines how net positive gains can be achieved in a ubtropical as well as temperate environment.

Space frame walls : facilitating positive development

This paper reports on progress in developing new design and measurement concepts, and translating these concepts into practical applications. This research addresses gaps in ‘best practice’ green building, and is aimed ultimately at replacing green buildings with sustainable urban environments. Building on the author’s previously articulated concepts of Design for Eco-services and Positive Development, this research will demonstrate how to eco-retrofit cities so that they reverse the negative impacts of past design and generate net positive ecological impacts, at no extra cost. In contrast to ‘restorative’ design,this means increasing ecological carrying capacity and natural and social capital through built environment design. Some exemplars for facilitating Positive development will be presented in this talk,such as Green Scaffolding for retrofits, and Green Space Walls for new construction. These structures have been designed to grow and change over time, be easily deconstructed, and entail little waste. The frames support mini-ecospheres that provide a wide range of ecosystem services and biodiversity habitats, as well as heating, cooling and ventilating. In combination, the modules serve to improve human and environmental health. Current work is focused on developing a range of such space frame walls, optimised through an innovative marriage of eco-logical design and virtual modelling.

The importance of gestation process dynamics

Principal Topic In this paper we seek to highlight the important intermediate role that the gestation process plays in entrepreneurship by examining its key antecedents and its consequences for new venture emergence. In doing so we take a behavioural perspective and argue that it is not only what a nascent venture is, but what it does (Katz & Gartner, 1988; Shane & Delmar, 2004; Reynolds, 2007) and when it does it during start-up (Reynolds & Miller, 1992; Lichtenstein, Carter, Dooley & Gartner, 2007) that is important. To extend an analogy from biological development, what we suggest is that the way a new venture is nurtured is just as fundamental as its nature. Much prior research has focused on the nature of new ventures and attempted to attribute variations in outcomes directly to the impact resource endowments and investments have. While there is little doubt that venture resource attributes such as human capital, and specifically prior entrepreneurial experience (Alsos & Kolvereid, 1998), access to social (Davidsson & Honig, 2003) and financial capital have an influence. Resource attributes themselves are distal from successful start-up endeavours and remain inanimate if not for the actions of the nascent venture. The key contribution we make is to shift focus from whether or not actions are taken, but when these actions happen and how that is situated in the overall gestation process. Thus, we suggest that it is gestation process dynamics, or when gestation actions occur, that is more proximal to venture outcomes and we focus on this. Recently scholars have highlighted the complexity that exists in the start-up or gestation process, be it temporal or contextual (Liao, Welsch & Tan, 2005; Lichtenstein et al. 2007). There is great variation in how long a start-up process might take (Reynolds & Miller, 1992), some processes require less action than others (Carter, Gartner & Reynolds, 1996), and the overall intensity of the start-up effort is also deemed important (Reynolds, 2007). And, despite some evidence that particular activities are more influential than others (Delmar & Shane, 2003), the order in which events may happen is, until now, largely indeterminate as regard its influence on success (Liao & Welsch, 2008). We suggest that it is this complexity of the intervening gestation process that attenuates the effect of resource endowment and has resulted in mixed findings in previous research. Thus, in order to reduce complexity we shall take a holistic view of the gestation process and argue that it is its’ dynamic properties that determine nascent venture attempt outcomes. Importantly, we acknowledge that particular gestation processes of themselves would not guarantee successful start-up, but it is more correctly the fit between the process dynamics and the ventures attributes (Davidsson, 2005) that is influential. So we aim to examine process dynamics by comparing sub-groups of venture types by resource attributes. Thus, as an initial step toward unpacking the complexity of the gestation process, this paper aims to establish the importance of its role as an intermediary between attributes of the nascent venture and the emergence of that venture. Here, we make a contribution by empirically examining gestation process dynamics and their fit with venture attributes. We do this by firstly, examining that nature of the influence that venture attributes such as human and social capital have on the dynamics of the gestation process, and secondly by investigating the effect that gestation process dynamics have on venture creation outcomes. Methodology and Propositions In order to explore the importance that gestation processes dynamics have in nascent entrepreneurship we conduct an empirical study of ventures start-ups. Data is drawn from a screened random sample of 625 Australian nascent business ventures prior to them achieving consistent outcomes in the market. This data was collected during 2007/8 and 2008/9 as part of the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE) project (Davidsson et al., 2008). CAUSEE is a longitudinal panel study conducted over four years, sourcing information from annually administered telephone surveys. Importantly for our study, this methodology allows for the capture and tracking of active nascent venture creation as it happens, thus reducing hindsight and selection biases. In addition, improved tests of causality may be made given that outcome measures are temporally removed from preceding events. The data analysed in this paper represents the first two of these four years, and for the first time has access to follow-up outcome measures for these venture attempts: where 260 were successful, 126 were abandoned, and 191 are still in progress. With regards to venture attributes as gestation process antecedents, we examine specific human capital measured as successful prior experience in entrepreneurship, and direct social capital of the venture as ‘team start-ups’. In assessing gestation process dynamics we follow Lichtenstein et al. (2007) to suggest that the rate, concentration and timing of gestation activities may be used to summarise the complexity dynamics of that process. In addition, we extend this set of measures to include the interaction of discovery and exploitation by way of changes made to the venture idea. Those ventures with successful prior experience or those who conduct symbiotic parallel start-up attempts may be able to, or be forced to, leave their gestation action until later and still derive a successful outcome. In addition access to direct social capital may provide the support upon which the venture may draw in order to persevere in the face of adversity, turning a seemingly futile start-up attempt into a success. On the other hand prior experience may engender the foresight to terminate a venture attempt early should it be seen to be going nowhere. The temporal nature of these conjectures highlight the importance that process dynamics play and will be examined in this research Statistical models are developed to examine gestation process dynamics. We use multivariate general linear modelling to analyse how human and social capital factors influence gestation process dynamics. In turn, we use event history models and stratified Cox regression to assess the influence that gestation process dynamics have on venture outcomes. Results and Implications What entrepreneurs do is of interest to both scholars and practitioners’ alike. Thus the results of this research are important since they focus on nascent behaviour and its outcomes. While venture attributes themselves may be influential this is of little actionable assistance to practitioners. For example it is unhelpful to say to the prospective first time entrepreneur “you’ll be more successful if you have lots of prior experience in firm start-ups”. This research attempts to close this relevance gap by addressing what gestation behaviours might be appropriate, when actions best be focused, and most importantly in what circumstances. Further, we make a contribution to the entrepreneurship literature, examining the role that gestation process dynamics play in outcomes, by specifically attributing these to the nature of the venture itself. This extension is to the best of our knowledge new to the research field.

Does venture opportunity variation matter? investigating systematic process differences between innovative and imitative new ventures

The central thesis in the article is that the venture creation process is different for innovative versus imitative ventures. This holds up; the pace of the process differs by type of venture as do, in line with theory-based hypotheses, the effects of certain human capital (HC) and social capital (SC) predictors. Importantly, and somewhat unexpectedly, the theoretically derived models using HC, SC, and certain controls are relatively successful explaining progress in the creation process for the minority of innovative ventures, but achieve very limited success for the imitative majority. This may be due to a rationalistic bias in conventional theorizing and suggests that there is need for considerable theoretical development regarding the important phenomenon of new venture creation processes. Another important result is that the building up of instrumental social capital, which we assess comprehensively and as a time variant construct, is important for making progress with both types of ventures, and increasingly, so as the process progresses. This result corroborates with stronger operationalization and more appropriate analysis method what previously published research has only been able to hint at.

The differential effects of organizational antecedents on dimensions of corporate entrepreneurship

This study seeks to further delineate how organizational antecedents differentially influence the three components of corporate entrepreneurship: innovation, venturing or strategic renewal. We argue that structural differentiation may help organizations to maintain multiple and often conflicting demands of entrepreneurial and mainstream activities. Taking a social capital perspective, our study further examines two contingencies in the form of informal integration mechanisms (i.e. connectedness and TMT social integration). Our findings show structural differentiation has a positive effect on all three components of corporate entrepreneurship, yet the effect is moderated by integration mechanisms. Interunit connectedness has a positive moderation effect regarding innovation and venturing, and TMT social integration has a negative moderation effect regarding strategic renewal. This reveals that innovation is influenced by informal integration mechanisms on the organizational level, strategic renewal on top management team level, while venturing is influenced by integration mechanisms on both levels.