Does the capital of social capital matter? Relational resources of the board and the performance of Brazilian companies

Based on theories of social capital, in this study, we seek to assess the impact of a board’s social capital on the market value of companies listed on the Brazilian stock exchange. As our indicator of social capital, we use the relational resources identified in the direct, indirect and heterogeneous ties of the board. Employing panel data from 508 observations, our results indicate that heterogeneous relational resources have a stronger and more significant influence than the resources available from board members’ direct relationships. Additionally, as the effects of board interlock are endogenously determined by several factors related to the firm level, we seek to mitigate the endogeneity problem using models of instrumental variables and simultaneous equations. Our hypotheses were consistent after controlling for endogeneity. We also check whether the board’s social capital could present a U-inverted effect on the market value. This relationship was only plausible in social capital by indirect ties. Finally, we isolate the effect of relational resources within and between industries on Tobin’s Q. There was no significant effect through interlocks within the same industry. However, ties with companies in several other industries were significant.     

Lean Product Development: Nothing New Under the Sun?

The concept of lean product development has attracted the attention of many scholars since its inception in the 1990s derived from practices at Toyota Motor Company. Key to this approach to new product development (NPD) are a few methods derived from lean production as well as longer established practices such as concurrent engineering. This makes one wonder whether lean product development is a new practice, a new method or an encapsulation of already existing methods at the time; this quest for the roots and tenets of lean product development, also in comparison with other methods for NPD, is the focus of this paper. This journey takes this propositional paper not only to the roots of lean product development and the context of its era of conception, but also to what this concept adds to other extant methods for NPD. In particular, this comparison draws out that other methods are trying to achieve the same objectives: the creation of products and services with value to the customer, the reduction of time‐to‐market and the efficient use of resources. This inference implies that managers of new product (and service) development can choose from a wider pallet of methods and approaches to enhance the performance of R&D and to connect better to manufacturing (including supply chains). Inevitably, this has implications for research on (lean) product and service development; hence, this paper sets out a research agenda based on the deliberations and gaps that have been uncovered in the discourse.     

青年社工工作模式探究

本研究从实践研究和理论探索两条路径出发,探究社区青少年社会支持工作模式。研究通过访谈法、问卷法、资料分析法研究了上海市社区青少年心理健康服务的工作现状,验证了从社会支持出发,开展社会工作的意义,并结合理论分析和研究结果,提出社会支持工作模式的建议。     

族群政治的制度逻辑——兼评菲利普·罗德的文章《苏维埃联邦政治与族群动员》

引论 前苏联解体是20世纪世界历史上最重大的事件之一.对这一事件之原因和性质的解释众说纷纭,而在西方主流理论中,归纳起来无外乎这样三种解释:市场经济对计划经济的胜利;民主体制对集权体制的胜利;民族主义的胜利. 这三种解释,其意识形态上的偏颇暂且不论,单就理论本身而言,都有不足之处.     

对外开放度与经济增长的实证研究——基于河北省数据的协整分析

本文运用协整检验、误差修正模型和格兰杰检验对河北省对外开放程度与经济增长之间的关系进行了实证研究。结果表明,长期来看,河北省经济增长与对外开放度存在长期稳定的协整关系,短期内对外开放对河北省经济增长的影响较小。对外开放和实际GDP增长之间具有互相的因果关系,但对外开放对经济增长的影响大于经济增长对对外开放的影响。     

Therapeutic change in Colombian families dealing with violence: therapists, clients, and referring systems in conversation

There is a gap in the Marriage and Family Therapy literature regarding clients', therapists', and family judges' theories of change in relational therapy for family violence. We conducted in-depth interviews with eleven court-referred families, their therapists, and two family judges in Bogota, Colombia. Interviews focused on their expectations of therapy outcomes, their understanding of change, and their evaluation of individual and relational therapy outcomes. We followed a grounded theory approach to data analysis. Analyses showed that therapists, family judges, and clients hold different expectations and theories regarding therapeutic change. Findings are discussed based on existing research on clients' and therapists' ideas about change. Implications for future research and practice are presented.     

Crying for Food: The Mexican Myths of ‘La Llorona’ and ‘The Hungry Woman’ in Cherríe L. Moraga

The Mexican legend of ‘La Llorona’ (‘The Weeping Woman’), who drowned her children out of revenge for being abandoned by her lover, and the Aztec creation myth of ‘The Hungry Woman’ — crying constantly for food, with mouths all around her body — have inspired Chicana writers in the symbolic representation of their own yearning, be it sexual, identity-building, or anti-patriarchal. This essay seeks to lay the mythical groundwork within this topic, as well as to illustrate with some particular examples the different reappropriations of these myths in Cherríe L. Moraga, mainly in her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001). With a view to opening up a past ‘that can provide a kind of road map to our future’ (: ix), these examples of transgressive women will be deprived of the feminine colonial passivity imbued by the dominant male discourse, and analysed as a complex, active, polyvalent mythological female corpus that integrates both life and death, womb and grave. This hybrid approach is inherent to the Aztec mythology on which Moraga relies in order to transcend Manichaeistic resolutions and probe the social, political, and gender reasons leading a hungry mother to commit infanticide.     

Application of the OCRA Method in the sugar cane harvest and its repercussion on the workers' health. Preliminary study

In Brazil the sugar ethanol industry has had strong growth in the last 10 years, sometimes due to the growing sugar exportation, sometimes due to the alcohol production for automobile fuel and for exportation. Despite the growing mechanization of the raw material harvest (sugar cane), the manual work still persists. The development of this article was based in the application of the OCRA Method in the sugar cane harvesting process, to evaluate the risks to the upper limbs by repetitive movements and epidemiologically prove the ratio risk x harm to the heath of the workers, as well as the probability of developing improvements in the working conditions. The analysis process consists of studying the work organization, the risks to the health of the worker and the distribution of the recovery periods during the working day.     

会展经济下廊坊市物流价值链优化研究

会展业能给主办地带来源源不断的商流、物流、人流、资金流、信息流,创造商机,吸引投资,推动商贸旅游业的发展,进而拉动其他产业的发展,同时对提升城市的品牌和知名度起到了积极作用。然而,当廊坊市会展项目逐年攀升的同时,也遇到了发展中的瓶颈——会展物流。文章首先从会展物流的价值链分解进行分析,继而分析了现代会展物流的特点,最后结合廊坊会展物流现状,分析廊坊会展物流的优化策略。     

Understanding the theory behind the Last Planner System using the Language-Action Perspective: two case studies

Since the Last Planner System® (LPS) was devised in the early 90s, a number of studies have pointed out the need to understand the underlying theory in which it is based on. The Language-Action Perspective (LAP) has been suggested as a suitable approach to understand the management of commitments in the LPS. This paper aims to assess the contribution of LAP to understand construction planning and control systems based on LPS. Two case studies were carried out in different construction companies, both highly experienced on the use of LPS. The results reveal the role of LAP for creating explicit representations of commitment flows that can be used to explain the sources of complexity and failures in planning systems, as well as for describing the profile of planning and control meetings.