Neo-colonial dynamics in global professional service firms: a periphery perspective

ABSTRACT

This article analyses neo-colonial dynamics at peripheral units of a Western global professional service firm. Drawing on postcolonial theory, an empirical study at global news agency Reuters’ subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bangalore shows how socio-ideological and technocratic control mechanisms allow subsidiary workers to elevate their status, while still cementing their role as dominated in the global hierarchy and silencing any resistance. Thus, on the one hand, it might appear that the global service firm provides periphery units the opportunity to become equals of core units, representing a ‘nurturing’ role achieved by instilling aspirational values and shaping imaginations. On the other hand, coercive and universalising routines such as performance assessments highlight the ambivalent nature of global firm initiatives to incorporate the periphery on an equal footing with core units, demonstrating the countervailing nature of contemporary power relations.     

Integrating resilience and positive youth development for the promotion of positive health behaviours among ethnic minorities: a conceptual framework

Hong Kong, a traditionally ethnically homogeneous society, seems to fail encouraging positive development of ethnic minority young people. Studying resilient ethnic minority, young adults may provide insights into developing programmes and policies to encourage positive health behaviours. A pilot qualitative study of individual interviews with South Asian young minority adults was conducted to develop a conceptual framework by incorporating resilience and positive youth development. Based on the findings of this study, resilience and positive youth development contribute to young ethnic minorities’ positive health behaviours. This study may benefit culturally tailored research implications for young ethnic minorities.     

A systematic review of studies on ethnic minority youth development in Hong Kong: an application of the ecological framework

Abstract

Ethnic minority young people play a significant role in the socio-economic growth of an ageing society with a decreasing fertility rate. The successful social integration of individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds within a society is a core value of the social work profession. This study examines the understanding of ethnic minority youth development in Hong Kong using a systematic review methodology. Risk prevention and positive promotion factors were identified using Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework. Articles were searched through multiple databases in English, and 36 academic articles were reviewed. These studies mainly examined the risks of academic failure of these students in Hong Kong while few focused on the positive directions of multidimensional youth development. Future social work research and practice should examine positive youth development for ethnic minorities which can inform social work practice in Hong Kong and within other East Asian traditionally ethnically homogeneous societies undergoing significant changes in ethnic diversity.     

Women for Ending Israeli Occupation in Palestine and for Building Peace

This article does not have an abstract     

Studying Modern Nation‐State in a World‐Historical Perspective: The Instance of Iraq

By examining conceptual and historical approaches on modern state and state formation in the context of Iraq, this paper addresses four interrelated methodological aspects of studying state formation (1) to contest the simplicity of Eurocentric knowledge production in studying state formation especially in the periphery, (2) to bring capital and nation‐state into a relational analysis and to call for research on how they constitute each other historically and geographically, (3) to integrate methodologically local and world‐historical context in understanding the historical complexity of state formation, (4) to problematize the concepts of “capital relation” in order to recognize nature and transformation of nature in the study of state formation.     

Heteroscedastic and heavy-tailed regression with mixtures of skew Laplace normal distributions

Joint modelling skewness and heterogeneity is challenging in data analysis, particularly in regression analysis which allows a random probability distribution to change flexibly with covariates. This paper, based on a skew Laplace normal (SLN) mixture of location, scale, and skewness, introduces a new regression model which provides a flexible modelling of location, scale and skewness parameters simultaneously. The maximum likelihood (ML) estimators of all parameters of the proposed model via the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm as well as their asymptotic properties are derived. Numerical analyses via a simulation study and a real data example are used to illustrate the performance of the proposed model.     

An Auction Mechanism for Pricing and Capacity Allocation with Multiple Products

We consider a pricing and short‐term capacity allocation problem in the presence of buyers with orders for bundles of products. The supplier's objective is to maximize her net profit, computed as the difference between the revenue generated through sales of products and the production and inventory holding costs. The objective of each buyer is similarly profit maximization, where a buyer's profit is computed as the difference between the time‐dependent utility of the product bundle he plans to buy, expressed in monetary terms, and the price of the bundle. We assume that bundles' utilities are buyers' private information and address the problem of allocating the facility's output. We directly consider the products that constitute the supplier's output as market goods. We study the case where the supplier follows an anonymous and linear pricing strategy, with extensions that include quantity discounts and time‐dependent product and delivery prices. In this setting, the winner determination problem integrates the capacity allocation and scheduling decisions. We propose an iterative auction mechanism with non‐decreasing prices to solve this complex problem, and present a computational analysis to investigate the efficiency of the proposed method under supplier's different pricing strategies. Our analysis shows that the problem with private information can be effectively solved with the proposed auction mechanism. Furthermore, the results indicate that the auction mechanism achieves more than 80% of the system's profit, and the supplier receives a higher percentage of profit especially when the ratio of demand to available capacity is high.     

A new alternative quantile regression model for the bounded response with educational measurements applications of OECD countries

This article introduces a new distribution with two tuning parameters specified on the unit interval. It follows from a ‘hyperbolic secant transformation’ of a random variable following the Weibull distribution. The lack of research on the prospect of hyperbolic transformations providing flexible distributions over the unit interval is a motivation for the study. The main distributional structural properties of the new distribution are established. The different estimation methods and two simulation works have been derived for model parameters. Subsequently, we develop a related quantile regression model for further statistical perspectives. We consider two real data applications based on the educational measurements of both OECD and some non-members of OECD countries. Our regression model aims to relate the desire to get top grades on certain young students in the OECD countries with some of their Education and School Life Index such as reading performance, work environment at home, and paid work experience. It is shown that the elaborated quantile regression model has a better fitting power than famous regression models when the unit response variable possesses skewed distribution as well as two independent variables are significant in the statistical sense at any standard significance level for the median response.     

Robust mixture regression modeling using the least trimmed squares (LTS)-estimation method

Mixture regression models are used to investigate the relationship between variables that come from unknown latent groups and to model heterogenous datasets. In general, the error terms are assumed to be normal in the mixture regression model. However, the estimators under normality assumption are sensitive to the outliers. In this article, we introduce a robust mixture regression procedure based on the LTS-estimation method to combat with the outliers in the data. We give a simulation study and a real data example to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimators over the counterparts in terms of dealing with outliers.     

Examining the Association Between Resilience and Risk Behaviors Among South Asian Minority Students in Hong Kong: A Quantitative Study

The relationship between risk behaviors and resilience among South Asian minority youth identifying themselves as Pakistani, Indian, Pakistani-Hong Konger, or Indian-Hong Konger (N?=?405) in a Hong Kong school setting was investigated using hierarchical linear regression analysis. Lower neighborhood disorganization, higher neighborhood characteristics, and higher individual resilience predicted lower likelihood of substance use in all ethnic groups. Stronger relationship with caregivers was associated with lower levels of substance use in all ethnic groups except for Pakistani-Hong Kongers (p?>?.05). Stronger multigroup ethnic identity predicted lower likelihood of substance use in Indians (p?=?.021) and Indian-Hong Kongers (p?=?.039). Resilience-based research, practical, and social policy implications are discussed.