The event of death: Reflections on the dynamics of emotions and embodied resistance in the Moroccan Contexts of hirak (movement) and la hirak ((non)movement)

This paper studies the role of emotions in creating spectacular revolt situations. We underline the travelling competence of sentiments and their power in crafting trans-local moments of embodied resistance. In contemporary Moroccan society, the adaptation of the Bouazizian style of protest has been a reaction to the prevailing feelings of worthlessness gripping the common citizen. The images of wasted beings in the post-2011 atmosphere have been associated with instances of social insurgence, by individuals who attempt self-immolation, or citizens treated by figures from the centre (e.g. police, public figures) in a way that inculcate in them powerful feelings of abjection, after which they feel irreparably delinked from their sense of humanity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how practices of al-hogra (humiliation) have produced cultural forms of abjection that could also be traced in the way common people inferiorize one another in everyday life through the use of a terminology of trash. By disclosing people’s non-subtle armaments of protest (i.e. self-immolation), we contend that resistance and its various trances, as well as the emotions that prompt them, have their origin in the reality of the body, realistic visions of the body owner and his/her awareness of the potential for realization (through it). Hence we will examine how vulnerable people manipulate the three conditions of corporeality, corporealism and corporealization, to subvert the humiliation and symptoms of social death imposed on them by the regime.     

Institutionalized norms of conducting research and social realities: A research synthesis of empirical works from 1983 to 2002

Based on a systematic review of the last 20 years of empirical research grounded in institutional theory, we identify some of the main norms of conducting research in this literature. The level of institutions, the formal/informal institutional pillars and the direction of effects are the foundation of these norms addressed by researchers in the last two decades. This review indicates that empirical research is well behind changes in social realities. This may be related to both the institutionalization process that takes place in any academic research and to the suggested difficulty that scholars find in moving away from widely accepted research models and practices, given the context within which they evolve. It is also concluded that local/national regulative institutions are giving up their position to more global normative and cognitive organizational field institutions. As the business environment become more global, giving more importance to transnational and informal institutions will be more crucial in institutional analysis of organizations.     

我国四级政府创新政策体系下的企业响应策略与行动:基于扎根理论的多案例研究

企业如何响应创新政策是政府创新政策能否发挥作用的关键.本文以我国6家高新技术企业为研究对象,采用多案例研究方法和扎根理论来探索科技企业对我国中央、省、市、区/县四级政府创新政策及其体系的响应机制,并构建了"认知-策略-行动"理论模型.研究发现,企业不仅会从政策文本中看到政策资源,还能从四级政府创新政策的竞争体系中感知到政治压力和市场压力,并识别出产业信息.并且,不同企业对不同层级政府创新政策的认知水平不同,这种认知上的差异使得企业对不同层级政府创新政策采取不同的响应策略.     

What Makes Better Boards? A Closer Look at Diversity and Ownership

This study investigates the joint effect of corporate ownership and board of directors' diversity configurations on the success of strategic merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions. Board diversity is defined as the extent to which its demographic diversity as measured by the culture, nationality, gender and experience of its directors complements its statutory diversity. A theoretical framework linking ownership, board diversity and M&A strategic decision making is proposed and tested. Based on a sample of 289 M&A decisions undertaken by Canadian firms over the period 2000–2007, demographic diversity is found to have a clear and non‐linear effect on M&A performance while statutory diversity is of limited influence. Ownership is found to influence the effect of diversity, making the relation finer and more precise. This has practical implications. First, statutory diversity is not sufficient for well‐performing boards. Also, ownership is an important factor. The most advocated board diversity aimed at insuring the board's independence is not valid across all ownership configurations. From a public policy perspective, results provide support for the principles‐based approach in governance. Governance regimes should encourage the search for a balance between board diversity and the need for cohesion that best serves the firm's purpose and obligations.     

PRODUCTION FLOW CONTROL FOR A MANUFACTURING SYSTEM WITH FLEXIBLE ROUTINGS

We study the dynamic routing problem for a flexible manufacturing system consisting of two unreliable machines and a finite buffer. One product-type is produced which requires two operations in sequence. The demand rate is assumed to be constant. Each machine is capable of performing both operations. The objective is to trace the demand while keeping the work-in-process low and the cycle-time short. An optimal control formulation is established for the dynamic routing problem. A production flow control algorithm is developed based on a combination of mathematical modeling and heuristics. The control policy is simulated and a comparison with the numerical optimal solution shows that it performs well for the instances under consideration.     

Improved construction for pooling design

Pooling design is a mathematical tool with many applications in molecular biology, specially to reduce the number of tests for DNA library screening. In this note, we study construction of pooling design and present an improvement to a recent new construction given by Du et al. (J. Comput. Biol. 13:990–995, 2006). P. Deng and W. Wu supported in part by National Science Foundation under grants CCF-0514796 and CNS-0524429. T. Znati supported in part by National Science Foundation under grant CCF-0548895.     

On the complexity and approximation of non-unique probe selection using d-disjunct matrix

In this paper, we studied the MINimum-d-Disjunct Submatrix (MIN-d-DS), which can be used to select the minimum number of non-unique probes for viruses identification. We prove that MIN-d-DS is NP-hard for any fixed d. Using d-disjunct matrix, we present an O(log k)-approximation algorithm where k is an upper bound on the maximum number of targets hybridized to a probe. We also present a (1+(d+1)log n)-approximation algorithm to identify at most d targets in the presence of experimental errors. Our approximation algorithms also yield a linear time complexity for the decoding algorithms. The research of T. Znati was supported in part by National Science Foundation under grant CCF-0548895.