Expatriation: Entsendung ohne Wiederkehr?

The paper follows the process of expatriation from the application until the return from a foreign assignment. Phases of expatriation are shown and interpreted. The investment into intercultural trainings will be related to their benefit. Finally some hypotheses will summarize at the end the mingle of intercultural paradoxes, organizational dilemmas and emotional roller-coaster.Considering group dynamic aspects, sending employees abroad shows some interesting aspects: the interplay of disintegration, integration, reintegration, the loss of affiliation and membership as well as gaining new belongings, and finally and always, the loss of one sole cultural identity. Furthermore group dynamic experiences enable people to cope with emotional and structural uncertainties, staying socially agile in the intercultural situation, where the context of communication and cooperation has yet to be created and developed by the people involved.     

Diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in women

Cardiovascular disease (CVD, comprising coronary heart disease and stroke) is the leading cause of death in both sexes in developed countries. Although women are nine times more likely to die from CVD than they are from breast cancer, there is a general public belief that the most common cause of death is cancer. The symptoms of acute myocardial infarction and acute coronary syndromes differ between the sexes. Women are less likely to experience chest pain and may have non-specific symptoms. Normal or non-obstructive coronary disease, as detected by angiography, is more common in women. Scintigraphy improves the detection of coronary disease in women. There is an urgent need to increase awareness of both coronary heart disease in women and the limitations of commonly used diagnostic tools.     

Children's Intent Participation in a Pediatric Community of Practice

This study analyzes informal learning, drawing on video recordings of staff-child interaction in a pediatric unit. It is shown that even very young patients engage in intent community participation, carefully noting fine variations in examination and treatment practices. They orient to everyday routines in successively more complex ways, gradually acquiring novel repertoires of practices; advancing from nonverbal uptake to an active use of medical terminology, and to actively assisting staff members. Ultimately, the children themselves assume almost full responsibility for routine procedures. The unit had adopted partnership-oriented routines, and the doctors and nurses spent much time in securing the children's consent and participation in their own treatment. In contrast to much earlier work in pediatric settings which has shown children to be marginal participants; even the youngest patients were engaged, and they successively acquired a set of novel practices related to treatment procedures. Together with doctors and nurses, the children could be seen to form a community of practice. But community is not something fixed; instead it is seen as an emergent phenomenon, dependent on staff members' and children's mutual alignments and collaborative action. Learning is thus analyzed as a social and relational phenomenon.     

Underwriting slavery: insurance and slavery in the Dutch Republic (1718–1778)

This article shows that slavery was more connected to Dutch society and economy than has been previously assumed. It does so by investigating the people involved in Dutch slavery insurance in the period 1718–1734, when the Dutch slave trade was monopolized by the state-chartered West India Company (WIC) and the period 1763–1778, when the private slave trade reached its peak and slavery insurance was more common. This article analyzes a variety of primary sources that have not been studied in this light before. The analysis shows that a large and varied group was involved and that slavery insurance was not a regional institution that only affected the Dutch colonies.     

The Discursive Construction of Women Politicians in the European Press

The appointment of the first majority female government in Spain generated a significant amount of coverage in newspapers across Europe, synthesising the multi-faceted debate about the relationship between gender and political leadership. Through the combination of qualitative thematic and quantitative content analysis, this article examines the construction of women politicians across different European nations. By analysing the coverage of the issue in the main newspapers of four European countries (France, Italy, Spain and the UK) in the two weeks after the new Spanish cabinet was appointed, this article explores the values and ideal roles the media assign to female politicians. The article is based on the premise that mediated representations of female politicians can tell us important things about the relations between gender, power and politics. Such representations embody a set of assumptions about how successful women should look, behave and speak, and thus implicitly express judgments on models of femininity. Ultimately, such representations construct heroines and villains that inform our conceptions of women's political participation, thereby encouraging some forms of gendered political discourse and discouraging others. Our research found that while certain discourses celebrate women ministers for their (symbolic) emancipatory value, others judge them by their physical appearance or their performance as wives, mothers, and mothers-to-be.     

Comfortable and leisurely: Old women on style and dress

Abstract

This article uses wardrobe interviews with women in the ages of 62–94 to explore transitions and continuities during the life course. During interviews the women have defined their style preferences. One categorization favored by several of them was comfortable. Different meanings were attached to this concept. Practical and convenient outfits were described as increasingly important when aging. Garments that did not expose the body—and its changes with aging—were preferred. The informants talked about the importance of feeling at ease, appropriately dressed for the occasion and situation. They were concerned with feeling nice in their outfits but also stressed becoming more laid-back and prioritizing convenience in their later years. All of these examples had to do with comfort and being comfortable. Uncomfortable clothes were too tight, deemed wrong for the occasion, and unwanted sources of self-consciousness and visibility. Transitions in their style of dress had been gradual, slowly adapting to changes in everyday life as well as in their bodies.     

From Customer‐Oriented Strategy to Organizational Financial Performance: The Role of Human Resource Management and Customer‐Linking Capability

Drawing on the organizational capabilities literature, the authors developed and tested a model of how supportive human resource management (HRM) improved firms’ financial performance perceived by marketing managers through fostering the implementation of a customer‐oriented strategy. Customer‐linking capability, which is the capability in managing close customer relationships, indicated the implementation of the customer‐oriented strategy. Data collected from two emerging economies – China and Hungary – established that supportive HRM partially mediated the relationship between customer‐oriented strategy and customer‐linking capability. Customer‐linking capability further explained how supportive HRM contributed to perceived financial performance. This study explicates the implication of customer‐oriented strategy for HRM and reveals the importance of HRM in strategy implementation. It also sheds some light on the ‘black box’ between HRM and performance. While making important contributions to the field of strategy, HRM and marketing, this study also offers useful practical implications.     

Prediction in Multilevel Logistic Regression

The purpose of this article is to present a new method to predict the response variable of an observation in a new cluster for a multilevel logistic regression. The central idea is based on the empirical best estimator for the random effect. Two estimation methods for multilevel model are compared: penalized quasi-likelihood and Gauss–Hermite quadrature. The performance measures for the prediction of the probability for a new cluster observation of the multilevel logistic model in comparison with the usual logistic model are examined through simulations and an application.     

Balancing informality and need – policy responses to informal East-West migration in Austria,the Netherlands and Sweden

The article provides an analysis of policy responses to mobile EU citizens without legal residence in the Netherlands, Austria and Sweden. A comparative case study design uses qualitative survey and interview data to identify national and local policy responses to the implications of EU citizens from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) living without legal residence in the aforementioned countries. The theoretical framework specifies how the institutional logic of welfare regimes is likely to generate policy responses that address need, sanction informality or do both. The choice indicates the priority given to redistributive outcomes, administrative procedures, or both. The results reveal similar responses to those implications relating to the labour market, but slightly different approaches to the implications in the social domain. Policy responses to labour market implications have predominantly focused on sanctioning informality. Swedish and Austrian policy responses in the social domain have focused on addressing need. Dutch policy responses to social issues instead focused on sanctioning informality, prioritizing procedure. The results indicate that local and national policy responses to implications of informal intra-EU migration may be fruitfully understood through the prism of welfare regimes and related approaches to need and informality.