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.

Altered Landscape or Arms Race? Making Sense of Military Spending in South America

In 2009, South American military spending reached a total of $51.8 billion, a fifty percent increased from 2000 expenditures. The five-year moving average of arms transfers to South America was 150 percent higher from 2005 to 2009 than figures for 2000 to 2004.[1] These figures and others have led some observers to conclude that Latin America is engaged in an arms race. Other reasons, however, account for Latin America’s large military expenditure. Among them: Several countries have undertaken long-prolonged modernization efforts, recently made possible by six years of consistent regional growth.[2] A generational shift is at hand. Armed Forces are beginning to shed the stigma and association with past dictatorial regimes.[3] Countries are pursuing specific individual strategies, rather than reacting to purchases made by neighbors. For example, Brazil wants to attain greater control of its Amazon rainforests and offshore territories, Colombia’s spending demonstrates a response to internal threats, and Chile is continuing a modernization process begun in the 1990s.[4] Concerns remain, however: Venezuela continues to demonstrate poor democratic governance and a lack of transparency; neighbor-state relations between Colombia and Venezuela, Peru and Chile, and Bolivia and Paraguay, must all continue to be monitored; and Brazil’s military purchases, although legitimate, will likely result in a large accumulation of equipment.[5] These concerns can be best addressed by strengthening and garnering greater participation in transparent procurement mechanism.[6] The United States can do its part by supporting Latin American efforts to embrace the transparency process. _________________ [1] Bromley, Mark, “An Arms Race in Our Hemisphere? Discussing the Trends and Implications of Military Expenditures in South America,” Brookings Institution Conference, Washington, D.C., June 3rd, 2010, Transcript Pgs. 12,13, and 16 [2] Robledo, Marcos, “The Rearmament Debate: A Chilean Perspective,” Power Point presentation, slide 18, 2010 Western Hemisphere Security Colloquium, Miami, Florida, May 25th-26th, 2010 [3] Yopo, Boris, “¿Carrera Armamentista en la Regiόn?” La Tercera, November 2nd, 2009, http://www.latercera.com/contenido/895_197084_9.shtml, accessed October 8th, 2010 [4] Walser, Ray, “An Arms Race in Our Hemisphere? Discussing the Trends and Implications of Military Expenditures in South America,” Brookings Institution Conference, Washington, D.C., June 3rd, 2010, Transcript Pgs. 49,50,53 and 54 [5] Ibid., Guevara, Iñigo, Pg. 22 [6] Ibid., Bromley, Mark, Pgs. 18 and 19

Identity, Ideology, and Cinema: Making Sense of Japan's Foreign and Security Policies in the 1950s and 2000s

Japan is an important ally of the United States–the world’s third biggest economy, and one of the regional great powers in Asia. Making sense of Japan’s foreign and security policies is crucial for the future of peace and stability in Northeast Asia, where the possible sources of conflict such as territorial disputes or the disputes over Japan’s war legacy issues are observed. This dissertation explored Japan’s foreign and security policies based on Japan’s identities and unconscious ideologies. It employed an analysis of selected Japanese films from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, as well as from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s. The analysis demonstrated that Japan’s foreign and security policies could be understood in terms of a broader social narrative that was visible in Japanese popular cultural products, including films and literatures. Narratives of Japanese families from the patriarch’s point of view, for example, had constantly shaped Japan’s foreign and security policies. As a result, the world was ordered hierarchically in the eyes of the Japan Self. In the 1950s, Japan tenaciously constructed close but asymmetrical security relations with the U.S. in which Japan willingly subjugated itself to the U.S. In the 2000s, Japan again constructed close relations with the U.S. by doing its best to support American responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by mobilizing Japan’s SDFs in the way Japan had never done in the past. The concepts of identity and unconscious ideology are helpful in understanding how Japan’s own understanding of self, of others, and of the world have shaped its own behaviors. These concepts also enable Japan to reevaluate its own behaviors reflexively, which departs from existing alternative approaches. This study provided a critical analytical explanation of the dynamics at work in Japan’s sense of identity, particularly with regard to its foreign and security policies.

Identity, ideology, and cinema: Making sense of Japan's foreign and security policies in the 1950s and 2000s

Japan is an important ally of the United States–the world’s third biggest economy, and one of the regional great powers in Asia. Making sense of Japan’s foreign and security policies is crucial for the future of peace and stability in Northeast Asia, where the possible sources of conflict such as territorial disputes or the disputes over Japan’s war legacy issues are observed.^ This dissertation explored Japan’s foreign and security policies based on Japan’s identities and unconscious ideologies. It employed an analysis of selected Japanese films from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, as well as from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s. The analysis demonstrated that Japan’s foreign and security policies could be understood in terms of a broader social narrative that was visible in Japanese popular cultural products, including films and literatures. Narratives of Japanese families from the patriarch’s point of view, for example, had constantly shaped Japan’s foreign and security policies. As a result, the world was ordered hierarchically in the eyes of the Japan Self. In the 1950s, Japan tenaciously constructed close but asymmetrical security relations with the U.S. in which Japan willingly subjugated itself to the U.S. In the 2000s, Japan again constructed close relations with the U.S. by doing its best to support American responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by mobilizing Japan’s SDFs in the way Japan had never done in the past.^ The concepts of identity and unconscious ideology are helpful in understanding how Japan’s own understanding of self, of others, and of the world have shaped its own behaviors. These concepts also enable Japan to reevaluate its own behaviors reflexively, which departs from existing alternative approaches. This study provided a critical analytical explanation of the dynamics at work in Japan’s sense of identity, particularly with regard to its foreign and security policies.^

Multicriteria analysis in decision making under information uncertainty

This paper presents results of research related to multicriteria decision making under information uncertainty. The Bell-man-Zadeh approach to decision making in a fuzzy environment is utilized for analyzing multicriteria optimization models (< X, M > models) under deterministic information. Its application conforms to the principle of guaranteed result and provides constructive lines in obtaining harmonious solutions on the basis of analyzing associated maxmin problems. This circumstance permits one to generalize the classic approach to considering the uncertainty of quantitative information (based on constructing and analyzing payoff matrices reflecting effects which can be obtained for different combinations of solution alternatives and the so-called states of nature) in monocriteria decision making to multicriteria problems. Considering that the uncertainty of information can produce considerable decision uncertainty regions, the resolving capacity of this generalization does not always permit one to obtain unique solutions. Taking this into account, a proposed general scheme of multicriteria decision making under information uncertainty also includes the construction and analysis of the so-called < X, R > models (which contain fuzzy preference relations as criteria of optimality) as a means for the subsequent contraction of the decision uncertainty regions. The paper results are of a universal character and are illustrated by a simple example. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The subcycled Newmark algorithm

The popular Newmark algorithm, used for implicit direct integration of structural dynamics, is extended by means of a nodal partition to permit use of different timesteps in different regions of a structural model. The algorithm developed has as a special case an explicit-explicit subcycling algorithm previously reported by Belytschko, Yen and Mullen. That algorithm has been shown, in the absence of damping or other energy dissipation, to exhibit instability over narrow timestep ranges that become narrower as the number of degrees of freedom increases, making them unlikely to be encountered in practice. The present algorithm avoids such instabilities in the case of a one to two timestep ratio (two subcycles), achieving unconditional stability in an exponential sense for a linear problem. However, with three or more subcycles, the trapezoidal rule exhibits stability that becomes conditional, falling towards that of the central difference method as the number of subcycles increases. Instabilities over narrow timestep ranges, that become narrower as the model size increases, also appear with three or more subcycles. However by moving the partition between timesteps one row of elements into the region suitable for integration with the larger timestep these the unstable timestep ranges become extremely narrow, even in simple systems with a few degrees of freedom. As well, accuracy is improved. Use of a version of the Newmark algorithm that dissipates high frequencies minimises or eliminates these narrow bands of instability. Viscous damping is also shown to remove these instabilities, at the expense of having more effect on the low frequency response.