Myth of the Eternal State: Armenian Outlaws,American Outsiders,and the Ottoman Search for Order

Focusing on violent Ottoman contexts, this study explores state behavior, charts criminal taxonomy, and contributes to the state-outlaw paradigm an analytical conduit through which to explain state responses to the outlaws on discursive and institutional levels. At the center of this study are several cases that demonstrate the engagement of local outlaws with evangelical outsiders named George Knapp, George White, and Ellen Stone. It is my contention that, while mitigating specific activities involving these outlaws and outsiders, the state under study invents new traditions, empowers security networks, claims unaccountability, and executes double standards in pursuit of social order within its borders.     

An Investigation of Socially Advantaged and Disadvantaged Turkish Mothers’ Views About Training on Preventing Children From Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

This study aims to investigate the views of socially advantaged (N = 8) and disadvantaged mothers (N = 8) whose children are aged between 48 and 66 months old about the issue of sexual abuse before and after the training provided to them. The views of mothers in both groups were investigated before and after the 5-week experience-based training about my body belongs to me, knowing and expressing feelings, good and bad touch, good and bad secrets, knowing how to say no, and help resources. The data were analyzed using content analysis methods. The study showed that the mothers have inaccurate or insufficient information and approaches about preventing sexual abuse. However, short-term training provided to the mothers changed their views, and the mothers in the disadvantaged group gained more awareness. The mothers in both groups stated that sexual abuse prevention trainings should be disseminated in preschool institutions.     

Analyzing relational sources of power at the interorganizational communication system

Based on the critical theory of communication, managing stakeholder relations is significant to achieve more democratic decisions that reconcile diverse interests of various stakeholders. However, power inequalities among stakeholders might inhibit to achieve finely balanced decisions. More interestingly, these inequalities might emerge from the nature of communication among organizations. Conceptualizing interorganizational relations (IORs) as the relations of an organization with its stakeholders, the current study attempts to analyze the relational sources of power. Following a graph theoretical methodology, the frequency of interaction and trust were analyzed as the relational sources of power on a sample of 76 logistics firms. The findings of the study reveal that an organization’s frequency of interaction and level of trustworthiness affect its power over other organizations.     

Fair Groves mechanisms

We study allocation problems in which a costly task is to be assigned and money transfers are used to achieve fairness among agents. We consider a series of fairness notions (k-fairness for where n is the number of agents) of decreasing restrictiveness that are based on Rawls’ maximin equity criterion and impose welfare lower bounds. These fairness notions were introduced by Porter et al. (J Econ Theory 118:209–228, 2004) who also introduced two classes of Groves mechanisms that are 1-fair and 3-fair, respectively, and generate deficits that are bounded above. We show that these classes are the largest such classes of Groves mechanisms. We generalize these mechanisms for each and show that the corresponding mechanisms generate the smallest deficit for each economy among all k-fair Groves mechanisms. The first draft of this paper was written while we were Ph.D. students at the University of Rochester. We are grateful to William Thomson for his guidance and advice. We also thank two referees and the associate editor for their comments.     

Coordinated deterministic dynamic demand lot-sizing problem: A review of models and algorithms

Due to their importance in industry and mathematical complexity, dynamic demand lot-sizing problems are frequently studied. In this article, we consider coordinated lot-size problems, their variants and exact and heuristic solutions approaches. The problem class provides a comprehensive approach for representing single and multiple items, coordinated and uncoordinated setup cost structures, and capacitated and uncapacitated problem characteristics. While efficient solution approaches have eluded researchers, recent advances in problem formulation and algorithms are enabling large-scale problems to be effectively solved. This paper updates a 1988 review of the coordinated lot-sizing problem and complements recent reviews on the single-item lot-sizing problem and the capacitated lot-sizing problem. It provides a state-of-the-art review of the research and future research projections. It is a starting point for anyone conducting research in the deterministic dynamic demand lot-sizing field.     

MANUFACTURING QUALITY,RELIABILITY AND PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE

We consider an important topic from the traditional quality literature-the impact of conformance quality of a manufactured product on the preventive maintenance costs to downstream users of this product. Folk wisdom supports the notion that higher conformance quality translates into lower maintenance costs (as well as other components of life-cycle costs) for these users. We examine this proposition in some detail on the basis of a failure-time model that relates conformance quality to reliability. We consider both repairable and nonrepairable items that are maintained by a block-replacement or a minimal-repair strategy. In addition to maintenance cycles and costs, we discuss the value of information to the user as to the actual production quality, and the value of inspection.