Women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa: An institutional theory analysis from a social marketing point of view

This paper takes an international marketing (IM) approach to the study of women entrepreneurs (WEs) in sub-Saharan Africa by examining factors in the environments in which WEs operate. The goal is to understand better how environmental barriers of many types impact the efforts of WEs. Using institutional theory-driven analysis, findings from a wide range of literature are integrated, with special attention to issues of the social legitimacy of women as entrepreneurs. Results of this study demonstrate that WEs in sub-Saharan Africa face a daunting array of challenges arising from the socio-cultural, economic, legal, political, and technological environments in which they live. Moreover, unfavourable conditions in local regulatory, normative, and cognitive systems place additional burdens on women who desire to become entrepreneurs or to expand an entrepreneurial business. In order to address these gender-specific problems, social marketing is recommended with the goals of (1) changing social beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that negatively affect Wes, and (2) improving conditions in institutional systems and market environments. Recommendations in the paper suggest how to bring about changes in attitudes towards women, work and their independent enterprise. In conclusion, directions for future scholarly research are identified.     

Proactive and politically skilled professionals: What is the relationship with affective occupational commitment?

The aim of this study is to extend research on employee affective commitment in three ways: (1) instead of organizational commitment the focus is on occupational commitment; (2) the role of proactive personality on affective occupational commitment is examined; and (3) occupational satisfaction is examined as a mediator and political skills as moderator in the relationship between proactive personality and affective occupational commitment. Two connected studies, one in a hospital located in the private sector and one in a university located in the public sector, are carried out in Pakistan, drawing on a total sample of over 400 employees. The results show that proactive personality is positively related to affective occupational commitment, and that occupational satisfaction partly mediates the relationship between proactive personality and affective occupational commitment. No effect is found for a moderator effect of political skills in the relationship between proactive personality and affective occupational commitment. Political skills however moderate the relationship between proactive personality and affective organizational commitment.     

Condominium Townhouse Investment

This accounting case involves the evaluation of various alternatives based on a real‐life personal property investment. The Condominium Townhouse Investment (CTI) case uses introductory management accounting concepts and analyses to introduce students to the case method of learning. The main concepts reinforced are relevant costs and revenues, including differentiating between opportunity and sunk costs. Students are not only asked to define and identify these items, but to consider choices centered on the decision alternatives in their role as accountants in public practice. This case is especially valuable because it offers students the chance to become engaged in an analysis and decision‐making situation that they can relate to both personally and professionally because, one day, they themselves are likely to become involved in a home ownership decision. The case focuses on real estate as a personal business investment, and requires both qualitative and quantitative analysis, with more emphasis on the qualitative aspect. In addition, the teaching notes include methods and strategies for students to use in an introductory managerial accounting class or level‐1 MBA class.     

Modelling pesticide risk: A marginal cost–benefit analysis of an environmental buffer-zone programme

A newly developed indicator of the pesticide risk for aquatic biocenosis in surface water bodies is applied within an economic sector model, and is used to evaluate alternative designs for an environmental policy programme. For rural districts (‘Landkreise’) across Germany, different widths of riparian buffer zones adjacent to surface water bodies are evaluated in terms of efficient cost/risk ratios.     

Der Wert der Worte – Wie digitale Methoden helfen,Kommunikations- und Wirtschaftswissenschaft zu verknüpfen

The use of digital methods offers a chance to connect communication science with economics. In recent years, a growing body of research in economics has turned its attention to media content, assuming that journalistic coverage contains hitherto neglected information relevant for business cycles or financial market movements. Interestingly, these approaches largely ignore communication science’s established theories and empirical findings. This paper aims at building a bridge between the two disciplines. Its contribution is threefold: a) it provides an overview of the most important approaches in economics that incorporate media content; b) it operationalizes the concept of the “narrative”, as it is used in economics, and distinguishes it from the concept of the “frame”, essential in communication science; c) exemplifying our approach, we present a new Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) based on the topic modeling method Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), that enables us to isolate different factors of economic policy uncertainty contained in media coverage.Economic studies treat journalistic media content as a proxy for sentiment prevalent in society. Typically, they rely on frequency analyses of certain keywords, like “recession” or “inflation”. Even more sophisticated approaches, such as Shiller (2017), who calls for establishing a new branch of “narrative economics”, or Baker et al. (2016), who construct a comprehensive set of media-based indicators, make no or little reference to communication science. This neglect could be discounted as pure ignorance, but this misses the point. Being a predominantly empirical discipline today, economics relies on long time-series of data, that have not been available for media content, a gap rendering the two disciplines largely incompatible.The gap is also reflected in terminology. “Frame” is a major analytical concept in communication science, while the term “narrative” has become in vogue in economics. Although both concepts are closely connected, they are rarely properly distinguished from each other. “Frame” can be considered as a rather static concept that applies during a limited period of time. “Narrative”, in contrast, implies dynamic properties, i.?e., the sorting of events, causes and effects over time, that explain how the current state of the world has come about, as stressed by Tenenboim-Weinblatt et al. (2016).In this paper, we propose a synergetic concept. Following Entman (1993), a media frame contains four elements: a) a problem definition, b) a problem diagnosis, c) a moral judgement, and d) possible remedies. We augment this approach by adding two more elements. According to our definition, a media narrative comprises a frame, or several ones, plus e) one or several protagonists—persons, institutions, or social groupings (nations, classes, etc.)—, whose relationships are (often) antagonistic and may change over time; and f) events, that are chronologically integrated and that are (often) assumed to constitute causal relationships. To put it metaphorically: a frame is to a narrative what a still photo is to a movie. Both are valuable concepts; the still photo shows more details, while the movie provides a contextualization over time.Topic models like LDA are valuable tools for the measurement of media narratives. The probabilistic approach enables researchers to conduct what may be called “macro-content analyses”, an exercise that focuses on average reporting patterns in large text corpora and can be translated into numerical time-series, thereby facilitating compatibility with empirical economics. Based on a topic’s frequency analysis, its top words and top articles, “mean media narratives” can be formulated, that integrate certain events, protagonists and frames.In our case study, we exemplify this concept by applying it to an indicator that is currently popular in economics, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (Baker et al. 2016). The EPU aims at capturing political developments that are exogenous to economic models and therefore unpredictable. Essentially, the indicator is based on the counts of articles containing a set of search words, such as “uncertain”, “economic” as well as institutions like the European Central Bank. Using identical search words as the EPU for Germany, we construct a similar corpus for the years 1994 to 2017. By conducting an LDA-based analysis, we are able to extract additional relevant information from the data. In particular, the evolution of different uncertainty factors and their development over time can be detected.Our Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) contains six relevant news topics that are highly relevant for market developments: central banks, the national government, international politics, the business cycle, companies, and society. While the EPU merely shows how often uncertainty concerning economic policy is mentioned in the media, the UPI also indicates the origins of uncertainty. By grouping the six topics into three analytical categories—governments, markets, and society—we find a distinct break in the time-series. Before the financial crisis of 2008, the perception of uncertainty was rather balanced between the three factors. Since then, however, economic uncertainty has mainly been driven by political actors, most prominently by central banks. The corresponding narratives are a two-chapter story: in the first part, up to 2008, stable financial markets and smoothed business cycles prevailed, making central banking a rather straight-forward task. The second part is characterized by multiple crises, leaving central banks as dominant actors, that intervened with unconventional measures. Thereby, they became stabilizing forces, but at the same time sources of uncertainty with respect to the timing and the impact of these measures.     

Natural Environments and Leisure among Rural–to–Urban Immigrants: An Application of Bourdieu's Concepts of Habitus,Social and Cultural Capital,and Field

This study explored the use of natural environments for leisure among rural-to-urban immigrants by adopting Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, social and cultural capital, and field. Data were collected with the use of individual interviews with 27 participants, including Mexican immigrants in the United States, Ukrainian immigrants in Poland, Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, and Turkish immigrants in Germany. The findings showed that for some immigrants, practices of social capital maintenance became disconnected from recreation in natural environments, while for all participants, nature-related cultural capital had low transferability in a migratory situation. Depending on their position in a new social field, immigrants developed different strategies to use local natural environments for leisure. Some strategies contributed to preserving old habitus, while one strategy (finding substitutes) contributed to gradual changes in immigrants' nature-related habitus. We suggest that embodied and emplaced skills of using nature should be incorporated in the notion of cultural capital.     

Doing femininity and respectability: social networks and social capital among female members of Dutch student organisations

This research explores the complexities that underlie the formation of women’s social networks at traditional social student organisations in the Netherlands, advancing theory on the intersectionality of gender and class in leisure space. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social capital it investigates if these social networks are segregated, and to what extent their divisions depend on previously acquired economic, cultural and symbolic capital. It analyses the hierarchical structures and ‘ranking’ of women’s year clubs within student organisations, and examines how the enactment and achievement of femininity determines women’s ability to move through social space. Finally, it investigates the use of social capital for women’s career progression. Semi-structured interviews were held with 20 women who were current or former members of one of the most traditional Dutch student organisations, the corps. Their accounts were used to gather information about the meaning women gave to their membership, and shed light on the role of previously acquired capital in the formation of clubs. Our findings show that women’s previously acquired social capital allowed them easier access to corps’ space and advanced their ability to navigate it. The establishment and ranking of year clubs and their members demonstrate the power dynamics that operate within the corps and the way class underlines network formation. Femininity was deemed one of the important markers of respectability and the enactment and achievement of ‘proper’ femininity determined women’s recognition and position in corps space. Despite the hierarchies of placement in the corps, most women profit from the social capital they acquired during membership, and can use it in selective ways for career progression and acquisitions.     

Relationship quality between exhibitors and organizers: A perspective from Mainland China's exhibition industry

Despite the fact that many destinations around the world have invested significant resources to build large-scale exhibition centers and host exhibitions to gain both economic and non-economic benefits (e.g., Jago and Deery, 2010), there is a paucity of research on exhibitions in general, and on the relationships among key stakeholders in particular. This study aims to address this research gap by investigating the relationship between exhibitors and exhibition organizers in view of its potential to significantly affect the success of a particular exhibition, and in the broader context the success of exhibition destinations. A survey collected 616 responses from exhibitors exhibiting at nine trade fairs in four cities in Mainland China. Study findings confirmed that exhibitors’ relationship quality with organizers is a second-order construct composed of four factors: (1) service quality and relationship satisfaction, (2) trust and affective commitment, (3) communication, and (4) calculative commitment. Furthermore, perceived relationship quality differed significantly, depending on key characteristics of organizers and exhibitors. Potential reasons that might contribute to these differences are explored and implications are discussed.     

Dinámica de la inversión extranjera directa en los estados de México: un análisis de cadenas de Markov espaciales

The aim of this investigation is to analyze the evolution of the spatio-temporal distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) across Mexican states. The literature that analizes foreign direct invesment in Mexico is numerous and diverse; however, it is argued that the analysis of the spatio-temporal distribution of FDI conditioned to spatial interaction effects in Mexico, is still absence. In this sense, by applying the spatial Markov chain approach as proposed by Rey (2001), we found a divergence process in the FDI inflows among mexican states that seems to get stronger over time. In particular, during the period from 2006 to 2013, the process of divergence towards higher-FDI-inflows quantiles occurs among states spatially associated with neighbors in lower-FDI-quantiles.