The acerbity of the social: how to include the social in governmental risk assessments

This paper addresses the expansion of risk practices through a case study of a government led project in Sweden purposed to develop a method to include social events in mandatory risk practices. Social heterogeneity was to be transformed into straightforward causality in order to turn the social into a manageable object. In this regard, the project was quite successful. By inviting social scientists into the process, otherwise often marginalized within risk practice, causality and quantifiable risk factors could be established and the model became a rigorous and legitimate scientific model. Although experts were granted significant autonomy and became experts far beyond their own area of expertise, the success of the model lies rather in allowing experts authority within confined boundaries. Grand narratives and critical perspectives are disregarded as too abstract and if social scientists are to infuse aspects of social critique they must adapt to these circumstances: they must become instrumentalists.     

The Cost of War: A Comment and a Reply

Intereconomics - In the July/August issue of Intereconomics, Ilona Sologoub argued that increasing the cost of war would limit the ability of an authoritarian state to wage a war. Here, Charles D....     

Multi-level and mixed-level <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-circulant supersaturated designs

Supersaturated designs (SSDs) constitute an important class of fractional factorial designs that could be extremely useful in factor screening experiments. Most of the existing studies have focused on balanced designs. This paper provides a new lower bound for the \(E(f_{NOD})\)-optimality measure of SSDs with general run sizes. This bound is a generalization of existing bounds since it is applicable to both balanced and unbalanced designs. Optimal multi and mixed-level, balanced and nearly balanced SSDs are constructed by applying a k-circulant type methodology. Necessary and sufficient conditions are introduced for the generator vectors, in order to pre-ensure the optimality of the constructed k-circulant SSDs. The provided lower bounds were used to measure the efficiency of the generated designs. The presented methodology leads to a number of new families of improved SSDs, providing tools for directly constructing optimal or nearly-optimal k-circulant designs by just checking the corresponding generator vector.     

Khat-chewing in liminal leisure spaces: British-Somali youth on the margins

Khat-chewing, a controversial leisure activity within the Somali diaspora in Britain, has received little attention within the academic field of Leisure Studies. This paper reports on ethnographic research to provide insights into the unique locations where young British-Somali men chew khat, exposing the liminal qualities of such localities. The paper begins with an overview of the contentious position khat-chewing occupies within Somali communities in Britain, highlighting reasons why young British-Somali men hide their association with the leisure practice. The discussion that follows considers how young male khat users conceptualise spatial environments, exposing how these locations temporarily produce a dual sense of privacy and sociality. The ambiences of such temporary leisure spaces remain open to the prospect of discovery, resulting in the use of discretionary tactics to maintain a sense of secrecy. In this context, we discuss how khat-chewing offers a sense of cultural identity and belongingness while also marking young British-Somali men as outsiders – even within their own communities.     

From private label to co-branded credit card: an assessment of the impact of a change in value proposition over customer value perception and company value capture

Journal of Financial Services Marketing - Purpose: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the success of a value proposition over time, considering two aspects: customer’s perceived value and...     

Wie die Materialengpässe den Arbeitsmarkt treffen

Wirtschaftsdienst - Although industrial production in Germany picked up again significantly with the recovery from the Corona crisis, supply bottlenecks for raw materials and intermediate products...     

Family firm’s management composition: the role played by family members’ age in TMT and supervisor levels

Quality & Quantity - Family firms (FFs) are the backbone of entrepreneurial fabric in many countries. Management of such businesses is complex because of their features: the overlap between...     

Capability and need: A framework for understanding why states create sovereign wealth funds

Over the past half‐century, roughly one‐quarter of states in the international system have created sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). As a case of sovereign states investing public wealth mostly in private markets across borders, it is not altogether clear why SWFs have proliferated to this extent. What explains their spread in recent decades? In this paper, I build on a multidisciplinary literature that conceives of SWFs as a type of insurance against external risk and argue that middle economic powers that are highly exposed in global trade and capital markets are the states most likely to establish these institutions. Such states possess both the capability to create an SWF of a size sufficient to insure against risk and the need for the insurance function of a SWF by virtue of their relatively vulnerable position in the global economy. To evaluate my argument, I rely on a data set consisting of all states in the international system from 1950 to 2012 including the 48 SWFs created during that period. I find that middle economic powers with high degrees of trade and capital openness are the states most likely to create SWFs.