Bittersweet and Paradoxical

The American Red Cross is the most active nonprofit organization involved in disaster planning and response in the United States. The organization deployed nearly 50,000 volunteers to provide essential support to victims of some 125,000 domestic disasters, including home fires, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, in a recent two‐year period. This study asks how American Red Cross disaster response volunteer experiences function to cultivate satisfaction and, at the other end of the spectrum, the kind of dissatisfaction that leads people to quit; it pays particular attention to ways in which volunteer management shapes dissatisfaction and fatigue because of implications for volunteer retention. Paradoxically, the Red Cross facilitates the highly satisfying act of helping victims, but volunteers feel dissatisfied when management practices get in the way of helping. The study suggests voluntary organizations that rely on skilled, long‐term volunteers to deliver services should evaluate and strengthen their communication strategies, recognition practices, and support systems for volunteers in distress.     

‘We fight for all living things’: countering misconceptions about the radical animal liberation movement

This qualitative content analysis of online documents compiled from the North American Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Earth Liberation Kollective (ELK) and Grassroots Ontario Animal Liberation (GOAL) network websites and Facebook pages explores how activism within the Radical Animal Liberation Movement (RALM) intersects with other social movements. While most literature to date traces the RALM’s (dis)junctures with other forms of social justice activism through analyses of their broad ideological assumptions, or the views of renowned RALM scholars, this research provides authentic insights into the voices of Canadian, American and Mexican activists as they are represented in documents they author themselves. Like activists in anarchistic, anti-capitalist, immigrant rights, Indigenous, prison abolition, prisoner support and radical feminist movements, those in the RALM critique capitalism, colonialism, hierarchy, racism, sexism, state power and the prison industrial complex. Our research calls into question the existing narratives that depict the RALM as an extremist, single-issue movement oblivious to all other forms of social inequality, injustice, marginalization and oppression. Rather, RALM activists are building alliances with other radical social movements to achieve the common goal of ending both human and animal suffering and exploitation.     

A grounded theory of living a life with a physical disability in Taiwan

This study explores the experiences of disability for a number of Taiwanese adults with a physical disability. Using a grounded theory approach, their experiences of living a life with a physical disability were gained through in-depth interviews. The resulting grounded theory ‘it is more than just the impaired body’ presents the dynamic interactions between the participants and the context in which they were living their lives and how they managed their lives within that context. With its inclusion of the cultural dimension, a holistic way of understanding the daily lives of those who experience physical disability in Taiwan is provided.     

What is Mentoring?

What is mentoring? Is it just a buzz word or is this really valuable? How can mentoring help one to grow and advance personally and professionally? How and where does one even begin? Many of us have these questions. In this article, I will share my perspective and provide some reflections on these questions based on my own personal and professional journey.     

The Romance of Surrogacy1

This article seeks to demonstrate and analyze the cultural and emotional work surrogate mothers collectively engage in on the largest surrogacy support website, http://www.surromomsonline.com . Surrogate mothers’ online stories and discussions frame contract surrogacy as a “labor of love.” Women often describe their surrogacy as a “journey” of shared love; they hope for a lasting relationship with the couple they carry for. This article explores how the language of love, learned and internalized through online communication with other surrogates, creates both a cultural conceptualization of surrogacy and a ground for action. Love and altruistic giving are consistent with close interpersonal rather than market relationships; surrogates hope for a long‐term friendship with their couple. Surrogacy journeys, however, not infrequently end in disappointment; surrogates feel betrayed when couples cut ties. As a result of collective learning, surrogates’ discussions increasingly articulate the position that love, even when unreciprocated, can lead to repeated giving; love is noble and ennobling. Surrogates find appreciation and support in their online surrogacy community where they agree that giving life is a moral good. This stance has contributed to a renewed enthusiasm to bear children for others.     

Bayesian ratemaking under Dirichlet process mixtures

Experience ratemaking plays a crucial role in general insurance in determining future premiums of individuals in a portfolio by assessing observed claims from the whole portfolio. This paper investigates this problem in which claims can be modeled by certain parametric family of distributions. The Dirichlet process mixtures are employed to model the distributions of the parameters so as to make two advantages: to produce exact Bayesian experience premiums for a class of premium principles generated from generic error functions and, at the same time, provide robust and flexible ways to avoid possible bias caused by traditionally used priors such as non informative priors or conjugate priors. In this paper, the Bayesian experience ratemaking under Dirichlet process mixture models are investigated and due to the lack of analytical forms of the conditional expectations of the quantities concerned, the Gibbs sampling schemes are designed for the purpose of approximations.     

基于在线评论数据的产品需求趋势挖掘

随着经济水平的提高和物质生活的丰富，消费者的需求变化也越来越快。能否迎合市场需求的变化是企业产品成功的关键。随着社交媒体的发展，消费者为了分享购物体验发表了许多在线评论信息，其中蕴含着消费者的需求变化。本文在产品特征提取和属性情感分析的基础上，构建了垃圾评论识别模型。然后，利用时间序列分析模型预测下阶段的产品属性关注度和情感计算。最后结合历史数据的变化趋势，分析产品属性的重要性和市场满意情况。利用汽车论坛上的汽车评论数据对本文提出的研究模型进行了验证。研究结果可以为企业制定营销策略以及产品改进与创新提供决策支持。     

风险投资对中国新三板挂牌企业绩效的影响

风险投资是推动“大众创业、万众创新”的新型金融工具和重要资本力量，对产业结构调整和经济转型具有重要作用。风险投资通过提供企业战略咨询、关键商业网络资源、人力资源管理以及监控活动等多方面支持影响被投资企业绩效。选取2010—2018年新三板844家获得风险投资和9 415家未获得风险投资的企业，通过风险投资机构的年龄、历史IPO数量以及累计退出金额衡量投资经验，检验风险投资机构的投资经验对新三板挂牌企业绩效的影响，并利用工具变量通过二阶段最小二乘法（2SLS）解决了模型的内生性问题。实证结果表明，风险投资对企业财务绩效和成长能力均呈现显著正向影响，且风险投资机构成立年份越久，在投资经验方面越丰富，对企业绩效正向影响越显著，同时，风险投资退出业绩越好，行业内对其能力的评价越高，越有利于为企业提供附加资源支持，从而提升企业业绩。