Family-Enterprise Initiatives as a Response to Socioeconomic and Political Change in Eastern and Central Europe

It is argued that family business enterprises can be an adaptive response to the transformations that recently have characterized Eastern and Central Europe. Family-centered initiatives are important for sustainable socioeconomic development. In this article, a family-enterprise incubator scheme for the stimulation of family and socioeconomic development is discussed. This approach incorporates resources, services, and supports beyond those conventionally offered.     

The Persistence of Outmoded Contraceptive Regimes: The Cases of Mexico and Brazil

Two of the most striking characteristics of contraceptive practice in the world today are the wide variation in patterns of use across countries and the tendency of the distribution of use by method to persist or narrow, even as new methods become available. The argument advanced in this article is that the disposition to commit to a reduced range of methods results from positive feedback in the process of contraceptive choice, and follows the logic of path dependence. The positive feedback derives, in large part, from social interaction among both the providers and the users of contraceptive methods. The persistence of outmoded contraceptive regimes is illustrated with the experience of Mexico and Brazil. In each case, it is argued that the conditions, events, and policies in the early stage of the adoption process have had a determinant bearing on the contraceptive practice prevailing in the late 1990s.     

Analysis of breeding bird communities along an urban-rural gradient in Berlin,Germany, by Hasse Diagram Technique

Breeding bird communities in Berlin were investigated at five study sites, which represent an structural urban-rural gradient, from densely built-up areas with sealed ground to green areas such as large parks. In this paper, we tested the Hasse Diagram Technique (HDT), an approach belonging to partial order theory, for its appropriateness to extract information about changes in species composition from our data set. As expected, the overall number of bird species was positively correlated with the urban-rural gradient, increasing from 12 found in the city center to 28 in an urban park. By HDT analysis, four different sub-groups of birds could be identified, contributing differentially to the increase in species number: (1) ubiquists, i.e., species found at each study site, (2) a sub-group, the species’ number of which was positively correlated with the urban-rural gradient, increasing with increasingly green areas, (3) a sub-group, the species’ number of which was negatively correlated with the urban-rural gradient, decreasing with a declining density of buildings, and (4) species, the distribution of which did not show any correlation with the urban-rural gradient. The results show that HDT is a suitable tool for formalized analysis of the pattern of species’ communities along an environmental gradient.     

Theoretic and empirical data-inclusive process characterization

Summary.  In process characterization the quality of information that is obtained depends directly on the quality of process model. The current quality revolution is now providing a strong stimulus for rethinking and re-evaluating many statistical ideas. Among these are the role of theoretic knowledge and data in statistical inference and some issues in theoretic–empirical modelling. With this concern the paper takes a broad, pragmatic view of statistical inference to include all aspects of model formulation. The estimation of model parameters traditionally assumes that a model has a prespecified known form and takes no account of possible uncertainty regarding model structure. But in practice model structural uncertainty is a fact of life and is likely to be more serious than other sources of uncertainty which have received far more attention. This is true whether the model is specified on subject-matter grounds or when a model is formulated, fitted and checked on the same data set in an iterative interactive way. For that reason novel modelling techniques have been fashioned for reducing model uncertainty. Using available knowledge for theoretic model elaboration the techniques that have been created approximate the exact unknown process model concurrently by accessible theoretic and polynomial empirical functions. The paper examines the effects of uncertainty for hybrid theoretic–empirical models and, for reducing uncertainty, additive and multiplicative methods of model formulation are fashioned. Such modelling techniques have been successfully applied to perfect a steady flow model for an air gauge sensor. Validation of the models elaborated has revealed that the multiplicative modelling approach allows us to attain a satisfactory model with small discrepancy from empirical evidence.     

The Disintegrating Effects of Equality: A Study of a Failed International Merger

In the literature on M&A and social justice, equality is regarded as an important principle to facilitate social integration. This article debates what happens when the equality principle is operationalized; from intentions in the pre‐merger process to the distribution of resources and decision‐making rules in the post‐merger process. In a merger between two state‐owned telecoms corporations in the Scandinavian countries, we found that the principle of equality had the reverse effects on social integration to that predicted in the literature. Instead of facilitating the social integration process, the equality principle led to perceptual and structural fallacies negatively influencing social integration. We suggest that these disintegrating effects were particularly strong because this was an international merger between two state‐owned firms of unequal size.