Ghanaian school-going adolescents’ self-perceived barriers of access to quality education: A qualitative study

Social equality has emerged as one of the important ideals of human society, especially for development. Moreover, education has featured prominently among the many key drivers of equality. However, in developing nations like Ghana, education represents one of the areas in which gross inequality has eroded the country’s potential for attaining equality and development. The aim of the current study was to explore adolescents’ self-perceived barriers regarding access to quality education in the Northern Region of Ghana and provide suggestions on the way forward. A sample of 18 school-going adolescents from six secondary schools within the Northern Region of Ghana was purposively selected to participate in face-to-face interviews. The barriers identified included limited resources, gender disparities and a multi-dimension nature of poverty. Implications for policy and research are discussed.     

Our Collaborative Future: Activities and Roles of Stakeholders in Sustainability‐Oriented Innovation

While stakeholders have long been at the forefront of sustainable development debates, the emphases have tended to be on different stakeholder pressures, or managing stakeholder expectations about controversial issues. In this paper we bring a fresh direction to these debates and ask in what ways different stakeholders can contribute to sustainable innovation in firms. Based on 80 semi‐structured interviews, we conduct a fine‐grained qualitative analysis of stakeholder activities in sustainability‐oriented innovation (SOI) processes in 13 different companies across Europe. Our analysis identifies eight roles that stakeholders play in SOI processes: stimulator, initiator, broker/mediator, concept refiner, legitimator, educator, context enabler and impact extender. More traditional roles such as legitimator and educator are less common in our cases. However, emerging roles such as stimulator, concept refiner, context enabler and impact extender are clearly identifiable and could be particularly valuable for SOI. We enhance a collaborative perspective of stakeholder theory, finding that stakeholders can play highly collaborative and proactive roles, and argue that secondary stakeholders may actually be more relevant for SOI than primary stakeholders. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

A meta-analytic review of influence strategies in marketing channel relationships

Influence strategies (ISs) are a dominant topic in channel research. However, the literature lacks a consensus on when noncoercive and coercive strategies are more valuable or damaging to partnership quality, and their judicious applications remain unclear. Mainly based on social exchange perspectives, we review and conceptualize several contingency factors in the IS-partnership quality relationships in this metaanalysis. The moderating results generally suggest that the stronger positive impacts of noncoercive ISs result from a higher appreciation for supportive attempts, whereas the higher negative sensitivity to coercive ISs can be attributed to the low acceptability of forceful influences. We determine degrees of appreciation and acceptability by the perceived significance of benefits/damages, expectations, and tolerance levels for both strategies. Also, we synthesize and meta-analyze the key outcomes and antecedents of both strategies in an integrated framework. The direct-effect results indicate that the choice of effectively applying both strategies necessitates a tradeoff between goals and priorities.     

3-D Body Scanner让生活变得更“合身”

想象一下,你只要走进购物中心扫描一下身体、把数据传输到网上,预定自己所喜欢的样式,然后就可以坐在家里等着收到完美的、合身定做的衣服,再也不用受笨手笨脚的裁缝的摆布或看商店服务员这样那样的脸色了。     

Structural components of Japan’s international trade

In the last issue of INTERECONOMICS Nobumitsu Kagami analysed Japan’s behavioural pattern and role in the international monetary sphere. The following complementary article covers the field of the country’s foreign trade.     

A dynamic heterogeneous labour demand model for German manufacturing

There is currently general agreement amongst economists that the discount rate to compute the present value of benefits and costs in the economic evaluation of public policies is defined according to the social time preference approach. However, whether this rate has to be used for the discount of non-monetary health consequences is a question for which there is no satisfactory reply. In this paper, it is argued that such a reply rests on the estimation of the relationship between the individual time preference for health and money in the contexts of private and social choice. In support of this argument an empirical analysis has been carried out in which the individuals making-up a representative sample of the population of Zaragoza (Spain) have been faced with a series of hypothetical inter-temporal choices. Their replies have implicitly revealed their temporal preference rates and have led to the conclusion that health consequences are discounted at a higher rate than monetary consequences. This would appear to be contrary to the standard practice applied in the economic valuation of health programmes.     

Strategies for Integrating Stakeholders into Sustainability Innovation: A Configurational Perspective

Sustainability is a key driver of innovation for products, services, and business models. Sustainability innovations are aimed at improving the environmental, social, and economic performance of the innovated solution. Given the complexity of many sustainability challenges, leading innovators may seek to boost their innovation capacity by tapping into the ideas, knowledge, and expertise of their stakeholders. In doing so they need to consider how many and which stakeholders to integrate into new product development (NPD) processes, and at what stage. This study investigates stakeholder integration strategies associated with high sustainability performance of innovation. Building on the literatures of sustainability innovation and stakeholder integration in the context of NPD, this study developed a configurational model to analyze stakeholder integration strategies. The empirical data consisted of 80 interviews and documents from 13 medium to large companies and their stakeholders in Europe. Using the fsQCA method, it was found that there is not just one effective strategy but three stakeholder integration strategies for high sustainability performance of innovation. The results imply that deep organizational engagement with stakeholders is necessary for the achievement of high performance. Otherwise, the three strategies range from progressive openness, which allows stakeholders to exert a fundamental influence on the sustainability innovation, to limited openness toward stakeholder integration. With the early secondary strategy pointing to progressive openness, companies integrate secondary stakeholders early on and so maximize the influence of different views on the innovation. As to limited openness, companies following the selective strategy limit the number of stakeholder groups in NPD but are indifferent to the timing of these groups’ inputs. Finally, the fine‐tuning strategy is least open to atypical views as it restricts the share of secondary stakeholders and only allows external inputs after the fuzzy front end phase when key decisions regarding the innovation have been made.     

Book Review

Tourist experiences are often profound and help to shape the social world of actors. Memories of travels become part of lived experiences to share with others. Experiences of travels or holidays achieve iconic status in everyday lives, and are communicated through the stories of life into lived identities. Accounts of touristic experiences in naturalistic everyday interaction have a story-like quality to them which become mythologised, fabled and flamboyantly and richly narrated to friends and relatives back home. However it is often extremely difficult to collect naturally occurring data of these storied experiences. Interviews in contrast appear to have a more structured and less naturalistic quality. This paper argues that using less structured interview situations, and a very close, fine-detailed analysis of interview data that draws upon socio-linguistic approaches, it is possible to reveal the underlying narrative structure of accounts for and of touristic experience. The paper argues that the natural attitude of the tourist is a ‘narrativistic’ attitude, that an account of touristic experience requires the development of a story, to define, describe and provide reasoned accounts for touristic events. Thus stories are crucial to the development of touristic accounts, and understandings of touristic experience must take account of these narrative structures in order to fully understand what tourists do when they talk about their experiences: they talk about their identities and their worlds. This paper explores how such narratives are constructed and what ‘things’ (other than the events themselves) they communicate.     

Choice modeling at the “market stall”: Individual versus collective interest in environmental valuation

The market stall, or valuation workshop, has recently been proposed as a way of addressing some of the limitations of conventional stated preference analysis. In this paper, we attempt to combine a participatory technique similar to the “citizens' jury” with choice modelling, a stated preference technique increasingly being applied in environmental economics. Our focus is on how changes in the context of decision-making (between choices made in isolation and those made in a group setting, and between choices made on individual well being versus collective criteria) produce differences in estimated welfare measures. The empirical context used is that of water quality improvements under the Water Framework Directive, the most significant reform in water legislation in the European Union for many years. We find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a valuation workshop and that moving from individual to collective choice produces, in this instance, a rather interesting change in both values and preferences which depends on the respondent's interests.