Zusammenfassungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung German translations by Monika Lütke-Daldrup.     

Partnering with Russia's new entrepreneurs: Software tsarina olga kirova

This article focuses on a Russian woman entrepreneur who established a very successful software firm under license from an American software company. The case illustrates a productive and successful partnership between a Western company and a new Russian entrepreneur. Recent developments in Russian entrepreneurship are reviewed, and the selection of Russian entrepreneurs as business partners is evaluated. The American company is described briefly, followed by an in-depth discussion of its Russian partner and founder, Olga Kirova. Conclusions and interpretations are offered on choosing the right Russian partners, assessing their personal values, objectives and leadership skills, being a good Western business partner, and considering Russian women as business associates.     

The big data divide and its consequences

Recent advances in technology and the increasing volumes of data that they enable have led to a wave of scholarly and popular attention to big data. While big data is often heralded for its ability to provide insight, the data, its analysis, and its outcomes are not evenly distributed. Currently, scholarship on big data is extending past work on the digital divide, theorizing a new big data divide. While this work most directly addresses the issues of ownership and access to big data, some work extends the divide to issues relating to skill and use. This extension opens up new complications relating to identity, social sorting, use, agency, and global development that are inextricably related to the issues above and to the study of big data. These issues go beyond the simple language of the digital divide extending inquiries into the realm of digital inequalities more generally. Any work on big data and the big data divide needs to engage with a more broad‐based notion of digital inequalities to be better equipped to handle the complex issues above, as well as the material, democratic, and identity problems that big data bring about.     

The service system challenges of work with juvenile justice involved young people in the Hunter Region,Australia

Current policies suggest that collaborative approaches are core to working effectively with juvenile justice involved young people. However, there is little research examining the workings of multi‐agency and collaborative endeavours in this field, or the experiences of the human service workers facilitating these connections. This paper reports on qualitative research that resulted from the Juvenile Justice and Education Equity in the Hunter Region project. Thirty‐eight human service workers were interviewed about their perceptions of the workings, strengths and challenges of the service system that supports young people who come into contact with the Children's Court in the Lower and Upper Hunter regions of New South Wales. Data analysis revealed three key themes related to (1) service gaps, cycles and maelstrom; (2) pursuing authentic service engagement; and (3) insider–outsider dynamics in service provision. Findings are discussed in relation to emerging practice and research agendas.     

Developing and testing a satisfaction survey for nursing home residents: the Ohio Experience

Input from consumers has become an important part of quality improvement in long-term care and for consumer decision-making. This paper documents the development of the Ohio Nursing Home Resident Satisfaction Survey (ONHRSS) through a partnership of state government, research, and industry experts. The instrument was tested and refined through two waves of data--a pretest phase and later with statewide data. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses with statewide data identified eight primary factors along with an underlying, secondary Global Satisfaction factor. Reliability of the domains ranged from .69 to .95. Recommendations for further refinement and testing of the instrument are discussed along with policy and practice implications.     

Service diversification and growth of professional service firms

This study investigates the impact of service diversification on the rate and mode of firm growth in professional service firms (PSFs). Drawing on the extant PSF literature, we identify differing views regarding the growth impact of service diversification. Specifically, some scholars suggest that the external client benefits associated with service diversification should allow PSFs to expand revenues at a rapid pace and pursue less merger and acquisition activity, whereas others imply that increased diversification can cause internal challenges with respect to learning costs, coordination and innovation that can limit the rate of revenue growth and encourage more mergers and acquisitions. We test these competing views using longitudinal data on 137 accounting firms and cross-sectional data on 125 law firms and find that service diversification is negatively associated with the rate of firm revenue growth and positively associated with the use of mergers and acquisitions.     

Monstrosities and moral publics

Interdisciplinary scholarship on neoliberal urban governmentality has been attentive to the knowledges and techniques of government currently emerging at the interface of local state politics and invested claims of voluntary private actors such as corporate partners and philanthropic agencies. This article draws attention to the workings of the aesthetic as an epistemological grounding for the rationalization of urban rule. Specifically, I explore a Toronto, Canada-based philanthropic agency’s reliance on a mise-en-scene of urban terror to animate its own self-validated knowledges about targeted inner-suburban subjects and spaces. In their circulation and demand for public address, the agency’s graphic public service announcements, launched in 2007, herald what I argue is a moralized set of knowledges about municipal renewal that has its own normative orientations grounded in a neoliberal political rationality, and tangentially, in racialized security imperatives. I detail various dimensions of the social life of a video associated with this public service campaign targeting ‘youth at risk’, considering the ethical, political and economic valences it was expected to convey; its semiotic exchange with other images and representations of disenfranchised spaces, subjects and communities; and the publics it attempted to interpellate. Importantly, given the agency’s current standing as a prominent player in Canadian urban policy arenas, I pay analytical attention to the visual campaign as a site for the production of knowledges about proper urban citizenship and social governance, and as such, a strategic-orienting device for urban policy interventions and directives.