Foundations for collaborative performance measurement

In the past years, companies have been establishing collaboration relationships as a means to become more competitive. This type of relationship presents some special characteristics that need to be managed properly in order to be successful. Performance measurement systems (PMSs) may support the management of such relationships by aiding to define and collect the necessary information. However, further understanding is needed to identify the elements and interactions among collaborative elements and how they can be integrated within a PMS. The aim of this article is twofold. The first purpose is to analyse the contents of works that tackle interorganisational and collaborative relationships as well as PMSs for interorganisational and collaborative environments by defining a typology. The typology comprises two dimensions: degree of relationships among collaboration elements and integration of collaboration within PMS. The second purpose is to perform a comparative study of the works for identifying main strengths and gaps for future research.     

A liberalism gone wrong? Muscular liberalism and the quest for monocultural difference

On 5 February 2011, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, addressed the Munich Security Conference on the theme of ‘radicalisation and Islamic extremism’. In his view this was the ‘root cause of the problem’ of ‘home-grown terrorism’ that allegedly thrived in an environment of passive tolerance, a liberalism gone wrong. The solution asserted Cameron was for British society (and by extension Western societies in general) to promote actively those values that allegedly defined it. What was needed was ‘a much more active, muscular liberalism’. This was a curious suggestion given that such an idea harks back to a much earlier time when Britannia still ruled the waves. It might well be dismissed as a throwaway line, if it was not for the fact that it was presented as a solution to a specific problem allegedly rooted in the specific context of managing diasporas and their attendant identities. But what is this idea of ‘muscular liberalism’? What does the resurrection of this mostly forgotten use of the idea of ‘muscularity’ signify in the current era? What might the Prime Minister's appeal to this sort of language mean in terms of illuminating the temper of our times? This paper aims to explore those questions. It is argued that the invocation of ‘muscular liberalism’ is more than a revealing discursive shift exposing the insecurities generated by the presence and political influence of diasporic cultures, as others have rightly noted. Beyond these insecurities lie even deeper fears, specifically that liberalism may be succeeding in empowering those who have previously been considered unimportant or unworthy of inclusion within the idea of British identity. Muscular liberalism, it is argued, is all about ensuring that the very values taken to be archetypically liberal are simultaneously applauded and neutralised.     

Teaching Note—Creating an Integrative Research Learning Environment for BSW and MSW Students

ABSTRACT

Research courses are often the least popular among BSW and MSW students because the connection between social work practice and research is not always evident. This teaching note introduces the structure of the Social Work integrative Research Lab (SWiRL), which was implemented in a social work program without a doctoral program at a large public university. SWiRL offers students opportunities to engage meaningfully in a variety of social work research projects using a framework of nested mentoring. Students gain hands-on research experience while they develop confidence, leadership, and mentoring skills within this structure. The authors discuss recommendations for other social work programs that do not have doctoral education or an established research environment.     

Deciding manufacturing priorities: Flexibility, cost, quality and service

Traditional manufacturing planning focuses first on understanding the realities of the product marketplace and then aligning the production processes to match those realities. By conforming to that independent-market dependent-production model and simply implementing the determined tactics, manufacturing misses the opportunity to create competitive advantage by adopting a strategy that enhances the firm's position. To illustrate how manufacturing can incorporate strategic objectives into its planning, we add a third dimension to the traditional two-dimensional form of the product—process matrix. Along the new axis we show how four key competitive thrusts relate to the stages of the product—process life cycles. The thrusts of flexibility, cost, quality, and service are made explicit by plotting them, in turn, against the stages in the evolution of the product and the process. Each plot reveals new ways for manufacturing to plan for and realize competitive advantage through the application of computer-integrated manufacturing principles.     

Description of a domestic violence measure for Puerto Rican gay males

A sample of 302 Puerto Rican gay males living in Puerto Rico and New York participated in this study with the objective of assessing the prevalence of domestic violence. A self-administered questionnaire was developed addressing issues of intergenerational violence, addictive behaviors, and domestic violence in three dimensions: emotional, physical, and sexual violence. The results concluded that close to half of the participants had experienced some sort of violence in their intimate relationships, have a history of being witness to domestic violence in their family of origin, and had identified in themselves and their families, addictive behaviors. Other variables measured are HIV and sexual coercion, drug and alcohol abuse, and levels of acculturation among participants living in the United States. The main objective of this work is to describe the development of the instrument used in the study. Based on the results of this study we describe the psychometric characteristics and content of the final questionnaire. Final recommendations are made for other researchers interested in doing domestic violence studies with Latino gay men and men who have sex with men.     

Young adolescents, tobacco advertising, and smoking

BACKGROUND: In adolescents aged 12-14, we measured attitudes to tobacco advertising. Our purpose is to understand the relation of these attitudes to tobacco use and identify the groups most influenced by the advertising. METHODS: Survey of adolescents on Gran Canaria Island, Spain, about aspects of family, school, peers, tobacco consumption, and tobacco advertising. The subjects of the double-stratified cluster sample were 1910 students at the same grade level in 33 schools; 86.6% were 13 or 14 years old, and 51.2% were boys. We generated measures for attitudes to tobacco advertising from replies to seven questions with ordinal scales by an analysis of categorical principal components. To relate attitude to tobacco advertising and the profiles of these adolescents, we used multiple regression and logistic regression models. RESULTS: Attitudes to tobacco advertising are related to some home and school factors, but most significantly to tobacco and alcohol consumption, to amount of time at home without adults, and to peer influence. CONCLUSIONS: It is possible to draw up profiles of the students most vulnerable to tobacco advertising, and to cluster them in two groups, the "vitalists" and the "credulous." The effect of cigarette ads is different between these groups. This study can help to orientate smoking prevention.     

A method for K-Means seeds generation applied to text mining

In this paper, a methodology is proposed in order to produce a set of seeds later used as a starting point to K-Means-type unsupervised classification algorithms for text mining. Our proposal involves using the eigenvectors obtained from principal component analysis to extract initial seeds, upon appropriate treatment for search of lightly overlapping clusters which are also clearly identified by keywords. This work is motivated by the interest of the authors in the problem of identification of topics and themes previously unknown in short texts. Therefore, in order to validate the goodness of this method, it was applied on a sample of labeled e-mails (NG20) representing a gold standard within the field of text mining. Specifically, some corpora referenced in the literature have been used, configured in accordance to a mix of topics contained in the sample. The proposed method improves on the results of other state-of-the-art methods to which it is compared.     

Achievers or slackers? Per capita income trends in European countries

This paper studies the catching up process of the per capita income of Western European countries for the 1870–2014 period. The contribution to the literature is twofold. First, the use of the Kejriwal and Perron (2010) algorithm allows us to detect any number of structural breaks in the level and in the trend without prior knowledge of the integration order. This is a significant improvement over the algorithms previously used in the literature which limits the number of possible structural breaks to two. In fact, we find that some countries show more than two breaks. Second, we use the longest data series in the literature. That enables us to tell a much richer story about the catching up process in Western Europe. We find that events like the World Wars, the creation of the European Economic Community and the information technology revolution, among others, were likely to cause such breaks.     

Wrapped Lindley distribution

In this article, we introduce a new circular distribution to be called as wrapped Lindley distribution and derive expressions for characteristic function, trigonometric moments, coefficients of skewness, and kurtosis. Method of maximum likelihood estimation is used for the estimation of parameters. We carry out a simulation study to show that the obtained maximum likelihood estimator is consistent. The proposed model is also applied to a real-life dataset, and its performance is compared with that of wrapped exponential distribution.