A Systems Approach to Social Entrepreneurship

Currently, disabilities organizations are increasingly being challenged by the requirement for individualized service, expectations to show personal outcomes, and the need to base their services on evidence-based practices. Social entrepreneurship (SE) is being put forward as an innovative approach for dealing with these challenges. This article presents a systems approach to SE based on a program logic model. This model identifies the input factors (a strong social vision, exploiting opportunities, maximizing resources), throughput strategies (entrepreneurial orientation, critical thinking skills, networking, capacity building), and outcome components (improving people’s lives, community-building, improving society) of SE at the micro, meso, and macro level. Also, the importance of planning for contextual changes as a social entrepreneur is discussed. The article concludes with presenting three inspiring practices regarding SE in the field of disabilities organizations.     

Moroccan women in Madrid: between change and continuity

This article focuses on individual migration and acculturation processes experienced by Moroccan women in the area of Madrid, based on qualitative research conducted in the Spanish capital in 2008. The results show that Moroccan women restructure their daily practices through complex acculturation processes, orienting them towards both the society of origin and that of arrival. They experience a constant struggle in getting to know the traditions of Spanish society, reorienting their former traditions and inventing new solutions. Moroccan women develop new ways of adapting themselves to their situation in Madrid. This acculturation process bridges the continuity with their culture of origin and reflects changes related to the new context. The studied women move in a transnational space with rigid borders, which is intersected by several social categories such as their education, ethnicity and gender, influencing their relative position within this space.     

There is an app for that? The impact of community knowledge workers in Uganda

Rapidly expanding mobile network coverage in developing countries offers new ways to reach poor farmers in isolated places. This article explores the potential for Information and Communication Technology to provide agricultural information and extension services to smallholder farmers, and links this to empirical insights of an intervention in Uganda, where community knowledge workers rely on mobile devices to deliver context- and time-sensitive data to farmers. Consistent with theoretical insights related to information inefficiencies, we find that the intervention leads farmers to move away from low-risk low-return crops toward more commercially oriented commodities. Our analysis also suggests that, for the case of maize, the intervention causes farmers to sell less on the market, but at significantly higher prices.     

Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.     

Family Communication and Adolescent Alcohol Use in Nicaragua,Central America: A Test of Primary Socialization Theory

ABSTRACT

Applying primary socialization theory to a sample of early adolescents from Nicaragua, this study examines direct and indirect associations between family bonding and adolescent alcohol use via substance specific prevention communication (SSPC) and adolescent efficacy. Early adolescents in 7th and 8th grades completed a self-report, cross-sectional survey. Structural equation modeling revealed that family expressiveness was significantly indirectly related to adolescent lifetime alcohol use through SSPC. Results are discussed in relation to primary socialization theory, family communication, and international substance use prevention efforts. This study provides supportive evidence for the important role of positive family communication as a protective factor for early adolescents in Nicaragua.     

Cohort Differences in Parental Financial Help to Adult Children

In this article, we examine birth cohort differences in parents’ provision of monetary help to adult children with particular focus on the extent to which cohort differences in family structure and the transition to adulthood influence these changes. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study from 1994 to 2010, we compare financial help to children of three respondent cohorts as the parents in these birth cohorts from ages 53–58 to 57–62. We find that transfers to children have increased among more recent cohorts. Two trends—declining family size and children’s delay in marriage—account for part of the increase across cohorts. However, other trends, such as the increase in the number of stepchildren and increasing child’s income level, tend to decrease the observed cohort trend.     

Estimation of Deprivation Level Functions using a Numerical Rating Scale

Evaluating and quantifying human suffering in humanitarian operations offers an innovative and potentially powerful way to assess the performance of humanitarian logistics (HL) and help build optimization models. Previous studies have suggested deprivation cost as a metric and have estimated deprivation cost functions for water using willingness‐to‐pay. Our study proposes deprivation levels, defined as the degree of human suffering caused by lack of access to a good or service, and estimates deprivation level functions using a numerical rating scale. Analyzing data collected from respondents with and without disaster experience, we find that individuals in the latter category estimate deprivation differently from the beneficiaries of disaster relief. Our study demonstrates that deprivation levels can be expressed as logistic growth functions with a typical S‐shape, and that these can be integrated into HL optimization models to better account for human suffering.     

The Role of Media Exposure on Coordination in the Humanitarian Setting

Despite high demand and resource limitations, humanitarian organizations (HOs) typically do not share resources and/or coordinate in the field. While coordination enhances operational performance and saves costs, the general perception is that it dilutes the media attention that individual organizations might receive, and negatively influences their future donation income. In this study, we empirically unveil the impact of media exposure and operational performance on the donations obtained by HOs. Then, based on the empirical results, we develop a stylized model to characterize the structure of preferred coordination policies with respect to an organization's funding source and main mandate. Our findings shed light on the incentives and dynamics that drive behaviors in humanitarian operations and provide insights for policy makers on designing and implementing mechanisms that encourage humanitarian coordination.     

Introduction: international academic mobility and inequalities

ABSTRACT

Higher education is one of the social fields where inequalities are produced and reproduced. Nevertheless, we still know very little about the ways in which heterogeneities and inequalities have been experienced and interpreted by those involved in international academic mobility. In this introductory editorial, we consider some of the crucial conceptual issues involved in the study of the nexus between inequalities and international academic mobility. First, we argue that it is important to take manifold inequalities into account when examining this nexus. After all, inequalities can be detected at different levels, and the mobility process is structured around multiple heterogeneities rather than by a single one. Second, we discuss how international academic mobility and inequalities attached to it go beyond nation-state borders. Third, we argue it is beneficial to extend the scope of to the mobility process as a whole, as inequalities in opportunities and outcomes are intrinsically connected.     

Becoming the mother of a child with disabilities: a systematic literature review

The transition to motherhood starts early in pregnancy and is completed when the mother feels competent in caring for the infant. Becoming the mother of a child with disabilities is demanding as their needs are complex. The aim of the review was to appraise completed qualitative and quantitative reports on the challenges of mothers of children with disabilities regarding their own transition to motherhood. A review of the literature was carried out through, first, a computerized search strategy to identify relevant studies from selected databases and, second, quality appraisal and thematic analysis of selected studies. The transition to motherhood of children with disabilities takes place in the inside world at home, the outside world external to home and the ‘going-between’ world of travelling between the two worlds. The mothers are challenged at home to integrate basic infant care with technical care of their children. In the outside world they often struggled to ensure that their children got the necessary professional care. Travelling between their homes and healthcare services posed many problems.