Social sciences and Business studies

I n t e r p o l a t i n g D y n a mi c S e mi o t i c s : E q u a n i mi t yA n dC u s t o me r S a t i s f a c t i o n B yS a r mi s t h aNa n d y C h a p t e r 1 E q u a n i mi t y : T h ed i c h o t o myo f e q u a n i mi t yi sc o mp u l s o r yf o r e n d u r i n gs u p p l ea n dd e t e r mi n e dt wi g sf r o m a n o r g a n i z a t i o nt os t a yt r a n q u i la n da t t e n t i v ei nt h ep h i z o go fc h a o t i ct i me s .E q u a n i mi t yg i v e s o r g a n i z a t i o nt os t a yi ne q u i l i b r i u m p o s i t i o ne v e ni nu n b a l a n c e dma r k e t p h a s e. Ah a s t yv e r d i c t c a nc o s ta no r g a n i z a t i o no v e rmo n e y. T h er e p u t eo fa no r g a n i z a t i o nc a nc o met ot h ec o u n t wh e nt h e r ei sl i v e l i h o o dwi t h i ni t se mp l o y e e swh i c hc a nma k ep o s i t i v ei mp a c tt ob a l a n c et h e c u s t o me r s a t i s f a c t i o n. E q u a n i mi t yh e l p st or e c o g n i z ei n d i v i d u a l ' sc o n t r i b u t i o nt oc r e a t eh a r mo n yi nt h i sc o mp e t i t i v e ma r k e t p l a c e. A no r g a n i s a t i o nc a nt o u c hi t ss u p e r i o r p r o s p e r i t yt h r o u g h o u t a ne n g a g e d p e r s o n n e l t oma i n t a i nt h eu l t i ma t eg o a l o f a n yc o n c e r nb yma k i n gi t sc u s t o me r h a p p i e r t h a n e v e r. Wh a t i se q u a n i mi t y ? E q u a n i mi t yi st h ec o n s i s t e n c ya n dr e l i a b i l i t yo f b r a i n swh e ns o me o n ei su n d e r t h es t r e s s. I t i s t h eb a s ef o r u n d e r s t a n d i n ga n ds o v e r e i g n t ywi t hl o t so f e mp a t h y , l o v ea n dc a r e. I t i sn o t t h e c o n t a i n me n t o f b e l i e f , b o r e d o m o r u n f r i e n d l i n e s s. T h ed e p t ho f e q u a n i mi t yi sv a s t wi t h o u t h o s t i l i t yo r ma l i c e. T h ep o we r o f e q u a n i mi t ya l l o ws

Öz Çalışanların iş tatminini ve dolayısıyla motivasyon ve performanslarını etkileyen en önemli faktörlerden biri liderlik işlevi olan yöneticilerin sergiledikleri liderlik tarzıdır. Bu çalışmada kaymakamların liderlik özellik ve davranışlarının en yakın astları olan yazı işleri müdürleri tarafından nasıl algılandığı ve bu algının yazı işleri müdürlerinin iş tatmini ile ilişkisi incelenmektedir. Bir anket aracılığıyla 111 kaymakamlıktan elde edilen veriler kaymakamların liderlik tarzı ile yazı işleri müdürlerinin iş tatmini arasında anlamlı bir ilişki olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır. İlçe düzeyinde faaliyet gösteren kamu kurumlarının performansının kaymakamın karar ve yönetim uygulamaları ile yakından ilişkili olduğu dikkate alındığında, bu sonuç kaymakamların liderlik tarzının sadece çalışanların motivasyonunu değil, aynı zamanda devlet kurumlarının da bürokratik etkinliğini etkilediğini ortaya koymaktadır. Abstract One of the factors that affect employees' job satisfaction and hence their motivation and performance is their manager's leadership style. This study examines how district governors' leadership traits and behaviors are perceived by their chiefs of staff, and the relationship between the governors' perceived leadership style and their chiefs of staff's job satisfaction. Survey data from 111 district governorships shows that there is a relationship between district governors' leadership style and their chiefs of staff's job satisfaction. This result suggests that the leadership behavior of district governors is a crucial determinant of not only the employees' motivation but also the bureaucratic efficiency of the government, given that all governmental offices at the district level operate under the supervision of the district governor.

Entrepreneurship has been one of the most popular topics in recent years due to its continuing dynamism in the Modern Market Economy. Many recent studies investigate the financial obstacles and difficulties in the establishment of new companies and commercial entities. The purpose of this research is to define entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship concepts in detail, while explaining financial factors and financial mechanisms at the forefront of environmental factors affecting entrepreneurship in the world. Besides, what are the obstacles to entrepreneurship, and how entrepreneurship is influenced by the financial barriers will be explained. The aim is to reduce the number of entrepreneurs who obstruct the economic development.This study assumes that there is a positive relationship between entrepreneurship and four financial factors which are affordability of financial services, ease of access to loans, venture capital availability, and soundness of banks. In this context, four hypotheses related to these factors will be tested by population averaged panel data analysis.

It is axiomatic that educators hope that students use their skills to improve their communities. “Doing good” in the world outside of academia can often translate into “doing well” in academic work. This is the philosophy of Business Anthropology training at the University of Minnesota. The Business Anthropology course combines academic work and real-world problems in business and public service arising in the Greater Twin Cities community. Students visit local corporations that employ anthropologists and anthropologically trained researchers in the local area. These are often the high points of the semester as students see how employees close to their own age use ethnography effectively in business. This paper outlines five recent research projects in business anthropology in partnership with business and industry in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region

Brands and products that are created in one country are readily accepted in other countries unenthusiastically. The reason is the international marketing strategies applied by the companies for huge marketing and spreading awareness about the product among the users. One such company is The Perfume Shop. It plans to expand its business in India in association with the Indian business giants. This study discusses the international marketing strategies applied by The perfume shop for achieving the expansion and the objectives, along with a brief review of the Indian perfume market scenario.

A conversation about the problems created today by the intensive development of modern science – especially medicine – which is leading, on the one side, to unwarranted enthusiasm; on the other, it is generating growing fears about technocratic demons. For this reason, among the issues discussed here are the ties between science and business, the media image of medicine, and the cultural factors influencing commonly-held notions about the nature of scientific research and its practical applications. We therefore cannot avoid talking about such controversial topics as disease mongering, genetic engineering and alternative medicine, sometimes called unconventional medicine.

Contemporary capitalism is increasingly technoscientific. Examples of this include the growing role of techno-economic expertise in decision-making, such as economists specializing in research and innovation policy; the social dominance of techno-economic knowledge claims, such as the quality of life benefits of pharmaceutical products; the financial importance of technoscientific organizational structures and governance, such as the ‘unicorns’—that is, companies valued at US$1 billion plus, despite never producing a thing or a profit—rearing their heads across Silicon Valley; and the continuing transformation of social institutions into producers of technoscientific outputs, such as universities and the ‘epistemic rentiership’ engendered by academic publishing processes (Harvie et al., 2014; Fuller, 2016). At the same time, a growing techno-economic optimism inflects popular and political imaginaries around the relationship between capitalism and technoscience, representing the latter as the solution to problems with and crises in the former (Morozov, 2013; Keen, 2015).

Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) – and no doubt other fields – have increasingly drawn on Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to theorize a variety of new 'bio-concepts'. While there might be some theoretical value in such exercises, many of these bio-concepts have simply replaced more rigorous – and therefore time-consuming – analytical work. This article provides a (sympathetic) critique of these various bio-concepts, especially as they are applied to the emerging 'bio-economy'. In so doing, the article seeks to show that the analysis of the bio-economy could be better framed as a political economy of nothing. This has several implications for science education, which are raised in the article.

As I read Andy Pike’s book, I found myself nodding along to almost everything he was writing, almost everything…. The only issue that kept me from fully agreeing with his arguments was that I saw it all through a very different conceptual lens. To be clear, I do not think that his theoretical treatment of the topic at hand – brands and branding – is weak or inadequate or anything along those lines; it is simpler than that. Conceptually, the book is built around an analysis of what Pike calls ‘goods and services commodities’ – a phrase that he comes back to repeatedly throughout the book. In contrast, I think that the book is really all about assets and not commodities, conceptually speaking at least, and I think this makes a major difference to how we conceptualize what is going on. In order to illustrate this line of thinking, I start this review by outlining what Pike actually puts in his book; then, I present some comments that point towards what I am calling a theory of rentiership.

As an increasing number of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, student debt, medical care, personal data, sunlight, etc.) are turned into assets, it is necessary to work out how value is appropriated from those assets through new forms of 'rentiership' (or rent-seeking). Often presented as the dark side of innovation and entrepreneurship, rent-seeking comes in many forms, including: government fiat (e.g. GHG emissions); monopoly (e.g. intellectual property); organizational arrangements (e.g. business models); and market configurations (e.g. value chains and networks, platforms). It is helpful to build on and go beyond the assumptions built into both Marxist and neoclassical economic literatures that rent-seeking is a problematic activity that distorts or corrupts the 'naturalized' working of capitalism or free markets. As such, the purpose of this open panel is to consider these different forms of rentiership as they constitute and are constituted by different forms of technoscience, in order to unpack the concept analytically and empirically and its political and normative implications for science, technology, and innovation. The panel welcomes papers on different forms of rentiership in technoscience, different conceptions of rentiership drawing on Marxist, neoclassical, and other traditions, and discussions of the analytical, political, and normative usefulness of rentiership as a concept.

Consultation is an important feature of research and, increasingly, researchers are required to work in partnership with stakeholders to increase the impact of their work. Our aim is to demonstrate what can be learned from the scholarship on, and practice of, member checking to facilitate productive knowledge exchange. Using dialogical analysis we explore three member check interactions from three different qualitative psychology projects focusing our analysis on difficult moments between researchers and participants conceptualised here as ‘sore spots’. We identify two major genres in these sequences: participant ambivalence and participant challenge. We then consider passages that allow us to explore a more theoretical understanding of these two genres in terms of the metaphor of portraits and mirrors. Overall, we outline how implicit epistemologies and theories of subjectivity (uncomplicated, blank, and complex) may be linked to the way in which stakeholders approach research. We also provide a map with regard to the theories within which member checks can be undertaken, associated research practices in terms of a range of researcher responses to stakeholder ambivalence and challenge, and implications of these moments for knowledge exchange for qualitative research but also for psychological science as a whole. We conclude that sore spots in knowledge exchange process can be productive opportunities of transformational validity.

Keywords: member check; knowledge exchange; research impact; dialogical analysis; participant validation