Being a desirable migrant: perception and racialisation of Icelandic migrants in Norway

In the aftermath of the financial crisis that hit Iceland in October 2008, increased numbers of Icelanders migrated to Norway to seek employment due to difficult economic circumstances in Iceland. Using critical perspectives from postcolonial studies and critical whiteness studies, the paper explores how these Icelandic migrants in Norway make sense of their new position as economic migrants within a global economy characterised by a growing sense of precariousness, while past inequalities and racism continue to matter. We also examine how these migrants are perceived in Norwegian media, and how social discourses of Icelandic migrants reflect larger Norwegian debates on racism, desirability and cultural belonging. Media discourses in Norway and interviews with Icelandic migrants reveal a hierarchy of acceptability of migrants. Icelanders are positioned as highly desirable compared to other migrant groups due to the intersection of perceived racial belonging, nationality and class. Our discussion contributes, furthermore, towards a critical analysis of the category migrant, by exploring how the term immigrant (innvandrer/innflytjandi) is used in narratives of Icelandic migrants in Norway and in Norwegian media discussions, showing the negative and racialised connotations of the term immigrant and how its understanding is linked with vulnerable positions and discrimination.     

Open innovation and quality management: the moderating role of interorganisational IT infrastructure and complementary learning styles

This study seeks to explain the influence of quality management on the relationship between open innovation and performance. We propose that, to contribute to open innovation performance, an organisation’s commitment to quality improvement must rely on the combination of its own resources and capabilities and its open innovation partners’ resources and capabilities. Specifically, we examine the moderating role of an interorganisational IT infrastructure and the complementarity of learning styles among an organisation committed to quality improvement and its supply network. Using data from 270 managers of European firms, our results show that the negative effects of quality management on open innovation performance can be overcome by complementing the organisation’s learning style with that of its open innovation partner, particularly, its supply network, and, most importantly, obtaining information technologies compatible with those of its supply network members.     

Threatened plant species in the river ports of Central Europe: a potential for nature conservation

Industrialized areas represent a special group of urbanized areas, but sufficient attention has not been given to them concerning plant species richness and its importance for biodiversity conservation. These sites are considered the main drivers of biological invasions and biotic homogenization on a global scale, but the question of how and to what degree they contribute to biodiversity has yet to be raised. Data for 62 river ports (16 German, 26 Czech, 7 Hungarian, 4 Slovak, and 9 Austrian) on two important Central European waterways (the Elbe-Vltava and Danube waterways) were gathered for 40 years. In total, 1 240 plant species were found. Of these, 371 were classified as threatened and protected, nearly one third of the total number of species found in all of the studied Elbe, Vltava, and Danube ports. Significant differences in the proportion of threatened species in ports and cities were not found. More threatened species were found in the Danube ports than in the other ports, but their numbers fluctuated depending on the size of the port and the region (country). The results showed that the ports must be regarded as special types of species-rich industrial areas; thus, they should not be considered to be only sources of spreading invasive alien species. When planning port development, uniformity and vegetation management that is too intensive should be avoided. Extensively managed open areas and habitat diversity should be maintained.

     

Teachers’ Knowledge and Beliefs About Child Sexual Abuse

Child sexual abuse is one of the main types of abuse still to be addressed within the field of education, yet the education system itself can serve as a primary tool for its prevention. A better understanding of teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about child sexual abuse will allow us to establish key starting points from which to utilize the system for prevention. Four hundred and fifty teachers participated in this study, completing a questionnaire regarding their knowledge and beliefs about child sexual abuse. The study revealed that over half the teachers, 65.3% (n = 294), had never received any type of training in child sexual abuse education and that the majority were not familiar with methods of identifying child sexual abuse, 90.7% (n = 279). Various mistaken beliefs were identified among the participating teachers, such as pathological profiles of abusers, that the vast majority of child sexual abuse implies violent behavior, and that there cannot be abusers the same age as the victim. These results indicate that knowledge deficiencies do exist about child sexual abuse among teachers and highlight the need for training in this field.     

Analysis of Spanish policies for the integration of immigrant schoolchildren

The Organic Law on the Improvement of the National Education Quality (Ley Orgánica de Reforma de la Calidad Educativa) readdressed one of the most significant educational issues: educational policies related to immigrant students. Therefore, this is an appropriate moment to evaluate these types of policies in three singular Spanish regions: Madrid, Catalonia and Andalusia. This article presents an analysis of the measures taken in three Spanish regions: Madrid, Catalonia and Andalusia in response to students’ reception, acceptance and enrolment of immigrant students. A qualitative methodology based on the comparative method is used. Diverse similarities, but also specific characteristics and differences, can be found among the three models associated with each region. There are several significant differences that can be appreciated, such as the institutional role, as well as other specific measures. However, singular features are also identified, such as the diverse policies for the use of the vehicular language in each of the cases. Finally, the comparisons highlight various critical aspects, such as attention devoted to the students’ native language and progress towards intercultural education in school strategies and planning.     

Fundamental accrued capital gains and the measurement of top incomes: an application to Chile

Most previous studies of income inequality have either ignored capital gains or have used taxable realized capital gains to estimate top incomes. Neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory. We apply for the first time a new methodology that allows us to account for fundamental accrued capital gains as part of the top incomes in a theoretically consistent manner. We estimate the shares of the super-rich in Chile showing that accrued capital gains have a large impact on these estimates. Also, the top income shares estimated using fundamental capital gains appear to exhibit a more stable and presumably more plausible time profile than estimates based on capital gains derived from asset market variations.     

Implementation of Jefferson-d’Hondt rule in the formation of a parliamentary committee

Same parliaments, to form a committee of size $q$ , use a voting process like the following: every parliamentary member votes for one out of a fixed set of candidates, and those $q$ candidates receiving more votes are elected for the committee. Assuming total discipline of vote, this is a game form in which players are the parliamentary groups. We investigate, according to some natural hypotheses about preferences, the likely distribution of the members of this committee. The main results are: (a) when fractional votes are allowed, there is a complete agreement between the distribution among the groups of the elected candidates that are outcomes of a Nash equilibrium and the distribution that, according to the size of the groups, would compute the Jefferson-d’Hondt allocation rule, and (b) when fractional votes are not allowed, there is a near agreement for a majority of situations.     

Preference intensity representation: strategic overstating in large elections

If voters vote strategically, is it useful to offer them the possibility of expressing nuanced opinions, or would they always overstate the intensity of their preferences? For additive voting rules, say that a ballot is extremal if it is neither abstention-like nor can be expressed as a mixture of the available ballots. We give a sufficient condition for strategic equivalence: if two rules share the same set of extremal ballots (up to an homothetic transformation), they are strategically equivalent in large elections. This condition is also necessary for the strategic equivalence of positional rules. These results do not hold for small electorates.     

Violence against women in Spain and Cuba: The same reality,two different visions / Violencia hacia la mujer en España y Cuba: una misma realidad,dos visiones diferentes

This study aims to analyse the acceptance of gender violence in Spanish and Cuban populations. We analysed the influence of sexist beliefs and other ideologies that justify unequal gender relationships. A total of 230 men and women from Spain and 200 from Cuba participated by answering a questionnaire. The results showed the effect of participants’ gender and nationality as well as ideological variables (sexism, beliefs in a just world and codes of honour) that legitimise the status quo of gender violence. The male participants and the Cuban participants accepted violence against women more than the female participants and the Spanish participants. What is more, the results showed a pattern in the influence of the ideological variables that differed depending on the participants’ nationality. In Spain, the relationship between participants’ benevolent sexism and the justification of violence was mediated by codes of honour. In Cuba, the relationship between hostile sexism and acceptance of violence against women was mediated by beliefs in a just world.