西方公民社会观适合中国吗?

20世纪90年代以来,公民社会逐渐成为学术研究热点。由于这一问题与当代中国社会政治变迁密切相关,因而引起国内外中国问题专家的广泛关注和讨论。尽管中国出现了社会分化、利益重组以及利益代表的重构,但是公民社会以独立于国家的自治和独立于传统结构如家族、单位或家庭的自治为前提,涉及公民结构及其思维模式的形成等诸多因素,其形成条件在中国才显露征兆,中国现在还没有产生公民社会。把西方语境中的公民社会观援引到中国,可能会出现根本不适用的情况。     

THE POLITICS OF MOTHERING IN A “MIXED” FAMILY: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION

Interweaving excerpts from her personal journal with research and literature about mixed race, interfaith, and bicultural experience, Nora Lester Murad uses autoethnographic methods to explore the experience of mothering in an American–Jewish and Palestinian–Muslim family. She pushes theoretical discussion beyond the experiences of “mixed” people to consider how the identity of otherwise monoracial/ monocultural parents may be transformed through the experience of parenting across socially/politically significant differences, particularly, national origin, culture, and faith. She also extends theoretical discussion beyond the confines of identity to consider parenting as a political process with an impact within and beyond families.     

Dynamic capabilities and high-tech entrepreneurial ventures’ performance in the aftermath of an environmental jolt

This paper contributes to studies on dynamic capabilities (DCs) by showing that a neglected environmental contingency – i.e. the occurrence of a jolt – shapes the DCs–performance relationship. We focus on high-tech entrepreneurial ventures because these are the firms that jolts affect most; in so doing, we also advance the understanding of DCs in the entrepreneurship field. We argue that, in the aftermath of an environmental jolt, the high-tech entrepreneurial ventures that use internationalization and new product development capabilities to modify their resource configuration and regain environmental fit enjoy better performance. Econometric estimates on a sample of 340 Italian high-tech entrepreneurial ventures confronting the consequences of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 confirm that separately using these two DCs has a positive performance effect. This effect is stronger for relatively smaller ventures. Interestingly, despite synergies should arise from the combined use of the two DCs, we do not detect any superadditive effects.     

Prozessverbesserung mit Reifegradmodellen

Since the Software Engineering Institute has published the Capability Maturity Model in 1991, maturity models evolved into a commonly used instrument for assessing the state of a specific class of objects and for identifying improvement measures. As process improvement is a core task of business process management and takes top positions on CIO agendas, maturity models are prospering in this domain as well. However, it remains unclear which maturity levels should be aspired for distinct processes or process groups. Numerous companies strive for increasing or even maximizing maturity levels. Some maturity model specifications contain oppositional advice, but lack concrete recommendations. Even academia provides no answers. Against this background, we propose a mathematical optimization model that builds on insights from value-based management in order to analyze general economic relationships of process improvement with maturity models. The guiding effects of these relationships are illustrated using the example of ??CMMI for Services??. We conclude by discussing limitations and by pointing out theoretical as well as managerial implications.     

The Big Red Fish

In the last decade, I had the opportunity to come across and hear about incredible stories of brave founders of Chinese families companies. These companies have become more and more important in the national economy and society. Accord-ing to recent statics, they are estimated to be more than 80% of Chinese non-public ownership companies, reaching 90% in Zhejiang province. Most of them can out-perform over the no family firms around the world as they have a longer term strategy and they desire to build business for the next gen-erations.     

Living Differences: Ethnicity and Fearless Girls in Public Spaces

Its strength (of the book of Jules Verne, Snr) comes precisely from knowing never to invent, but paying acute, almost hypnotic, attention to the real, so as to get it to yield up its secret and reveal its possibilities.(Writings on the City)