Transformer in navigation: Diverse government roles for open innovation in China's high-speed rail

Based on a longitudinal case study of China's high-speed rail embedded in the emerging economy context, we focus on what role the government plays and how that matters to open innovation (OI) for competitive advantage. By linking the OI literature with the national political institutions literature to motivate our research question, we propose a statist-based OI view to differentiate diverse government roles, investigating how government adopts roles in a combined way to push OI in stages. Our findings suggest that government is an important strategic decision-maker for OI. Specifically, the government plays various roles as commander, protector, cultivator, and intermediator, reflecting state activism derived from national political institutions, to construct institutional-level OI for domestic OI activities, and inbound and outbound OI across national borders. We find government can deliberately and strategically use its diverse roles in a combined way to push OI for competitive advantage through the industrial evolutionary process over time. Our study contributes to the OI literature and integrates the strategic management literature with the study of OI to provide new insights to explain the origins of competitive advantage from the state perspective.     

People with disability and new disaster communications: access and the social media mash-up

This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital communications platforms in times of disaster for people with disabilities has the potential to make already life-threatening situations considerably more dangerous. As we are increasingly coming to rely on a social media mash-up of digital platforms to assist in communications during disaster situations, the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities is as dire as if it was high ground during a tsunami or transport during a typhoon. The contemporary social media environment is characterised by a complex and overlapping network of complementary platforms, populated by user-generated content, where people communicate and exchange ideas. In this environment, YouTube videos are posted to Facebook and embedded in blogs, and Twitter is used to link to these other sites and is itself embedded in other platforms. These networks are increasingly supplementing and supplanting more traditional communication platforms, such as the television and radio, particularly in times of disaster. The concern of this paper is that the elements from which this mash-up of communications channels is made are not always accessible to people with disabilities. This evolving network of social media-based communication exposes the limits of existing Internet-based universal design.     

Identity and integration: The roles of relationship and retention in nonprofit mergers

Prior research suggests that nonprofits are flexible and possess multiple identities, although we know less about how transformative changes, such as mergers, shape nonprofit identity. This qualitative study draws upon in‐depth interviews from 13 nonprofit merger cases to explore factors that influence postmerger identity and integration. In particular, we focus on the roles of organizational similarity and relationships, program and personnel retention, and rebranding. Ultimately, we derive a typology of postmerger integration in nonprofits and suggest that postmerger identity may be classified in terms of absorption, preservation, or creation. Implications for nonprofit leaders are discussed.     

Homosexual Discretion and Good Taste: Two Rules That Govern Homosexual Sociability Space in Santiago de Chile

Homosexual sociability space in Santiago is not socially homogenous. Beyond non-heterosexual identities segmentation (gay, lesbian, queer, BDSM, etc.), the present article proposes a reflection observing certain social distinctions or differences that come into play to create a hierarchy among gay and lesbian individuals within that space. Using a qualitative approximation, we analyze the discourse of homosexual men and women about ways to display homosexuality in different places in the city, as well as some sociability practices used in homosexual venues. The resulting social hierarchy is understood through two central subjective rules: discretion and good taste, dynamic mechanisms that perpetuate the distance among groups within the same sociability space, and to some extent reproduce the city’s class structure. Given that material means to privatize and sophisticate homosexual expression are unequally distributed in Santiago, the resulting differentiated social networks end up configuring the visibility strategies of homosexual identity played out in the city in the last years.     

孤独个体与向死而生——多元文化社会中《凡人》的身份认同

美国犹太裔作家菲利普·罗斯的《凡人》讲述了一个关于失去与孤独、疾病与死亡的故事。主人公作为一个犹太裔美国人,因其身份的特殊性与美国主流文化格格不入,显得格外孤独与痛苦,这种孤独个体的特性也贯穿了其一生。与此同时,在他的一生中无时无刻不在与疾病和死亡作斗争,体现了向死而生的特点,即在绝望中蕴含着希望。在美国多元文化社会中,主人公追寻的身份认同正是当代美国人普遍的生存状况,表现了普遍的生存困境。     

Overcoming Old in Age-Friendliness

In this article, we explore views on an age-friendly space in the Netherlands by analysing the responses of older individuals (N = 54) in focus groups and by examining the perspectives around an age-friendly zone in the Netherlands, Parkstad Limburg. We found that a central issue in the wishes for living at a later age are adjustments to envisioned physical limitations that come with the ageing process; this includes adjustments to ensure safety, accessibility and mobility, in order to facilitate older individuals' efforts to stay engaged with the world around them. In their wishes, the older participants constructed ideal dwelling places that closely resembled a senior home, but at the same time they rejected wishing to live in a place that was identified as a senior home. We explain this paradox by the representation of such a space as being for old people, i.e. needy older individuals, which was not how the older participants wished to be identified. We conclude that the conception of age-friendly environments will have to face the difficult challenge of overcoming the association with old age, while simultaneously taking into account adjustments that signify and relate to the ageing process and that seem inescapably tied to oldness.     

“Who generates this city”? Socialist strategy in contemporary London

This essay, based on a “militant ethnography” of the attempts of the small radical grassroots activist group, Our London (a pseudonym), to mobilize a collective oppositional politics through activities around an election campaign, engages critically with E. Laclau and C. Mouffe's arguments on discourse and collectivity in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). I argue, on the basis of my findings, that while their model does provide insights that help describe the process of building collectivity from among disparate perspectives and identities, we need to go beyond a focus on discourse alone and consider the ways politics is shaped by material contexts. This is necessary if we are to understand the continued appeal of class politics as well as the difficulties in mobilizing collectivity in highly unequal and fragmented cities. From an activist perspective, the essay also highlights how developing a conception of collective interests and a critique of overarching systems of exploitation can be important in building political unity.     

浅析加强和改进高校的思想政治教育工作

高校的思想政治教育工作在我国的现代化建设和发展中占有着举足轻重的作用,但高校思想政治工作在实际的操作中依然存在着不容忽视的问题。文章试从高校思想政治教育工作的必要性、紧迫性两方面出发,对加强高校思想政治工作进行探索,进而提出一些改进措施,以期进一步强化高校思想政治教育工作。     

Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.     

‘Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood’: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse

This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi–ethnic and multi–class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The writers place themselves and people who share their values in that core, and immigrants at the margins. These strategies serve as a discursive type of spatial purification practice (cf. Sibley 1988) through which the grantwriters set up a moral and spatial order where they and other core community members are deemed to use space ‘appropriately’, and thus inhabit positive moral positions, while immigrant community members’ imputed ‘inappropriate’ use of space is used to construct negative moral positions for them.