Case Study Evidence Research Articles

Trabalho clínico legal para a proteção do direito à moradia decente da população com deficiência vítima do conflito armado

This document presents an analysis of the right to housing with respect to the population displaced by the armed conflict and shows how strategic litigation actions carried out from the clinical teaching of law can contribute to social change and the realization of the right to housing. worthy. All this is done from the evidence of a specific case study.

Policymaking on immigrant welfare rights: the populist and the mainstream right

ABSTRACT In this paper, we investigate how different types of right parties affect immigrant welfare rights across 14 countries (1980–2018) in a comprehensive mixed-method study. We argue that populist radical right parties (PRRPs) support retrenchment, liberals and conservatives oppose expansions, and Christian democrats rather protect or expand rights. Accordingly, we expect conservatives and liberals to be more receptive to both direct and indirect influence of PRRPs than Christian democrats. We apply balanced panel regressions, and also include interactions with immigration indicators. Changes in immigrant welfare rights are measured using a new and encompassing dataset (MigSP), that maps immigrant welfare rights in 14 countries over 38 years. Furthermore, we qualitatively assess model-based selected cabinets in Denmark. Our evidence confirms pronounced differences between different right-wing parties. PRRPs are systematic propellers of cutting rights and affect all mainstream right parties when governing together. Christian democrats are the least likely to conduct retrenchments. We find no quantitative evidence for the indirect effects of PRRPs (contagion) and immigration dynamics. The case study evidence, however, points to the importance of both factors and discusses why indirect partisan effects (contagion) and the politicisation of immigration are very difficult to address in the standard regression framework.

Transgender Students' Experiences of Bullying: Some Case Study Evidence

This phenomenological case study research explored the bullying experiences of transgender students in educational institutes.For this purpose, two participants were selected through snowball sampling who had a minimum of 16 years of education from different educational institutes in Pakistan. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and a within-case analysis was done. Both transgender students identified their gender as contrary to the gender assigned at birth, which affected them adversely, and they had to go through different experiences and issues as compared to cisgender students.Due to gender identity, transgender students faced different types of bullying (verbal, non-verbal, physical; and sexual) in different places(classes or corridors, playgrounds, washrooms, hostels; and social media or cyberspace), which led to serious consequences (depression,hiding gender identity, missing school or classes; and others). Implementation of training to sensitize students and teachers about transgender students to promote exclusivity, equity, diversity, and in discrimination is recommended.

When the means become the ends: Ghana’s ‘good governance’ electricity reform overwhelmed by the politics of power crises

ABSTRACT The 1990s good governance agenda created the ‘standard reform model’ for the electricity sector but after widespread adoption of its market and institutional policies, many developing countries’ electricity systems continue to suffer numerous crises. This article, using Ghana as a case study, analyses key drivers producing such crises. In the last decade, Ghana lurched from unprecedented shortages to electricity over-abundance, entailing spiralling debt. Rather than understand this through neo-classical approaches focusing on formal institutions and democratic pressures, this detailed empirical research outlines an alternative heterodox approach focused on political power and ideology. It demonstrates how intense competition entailed an all-consuming short-termist focus on elections. Alongside high modernist ideological beliefs in the power of megawatts to produce industrialisation, this created Ghana’s crises of absence and abundance. The article, therefore, finds that focusing on democratic institutions, the formal separation of policymaking and market motivations appears misplaced given the strength of countervailing political and ideological rationales that overwhelmed reforms. Alongside demonstrating the crucial importance of focusing on informal political power and policymaking beyond de jure institutions, this case study evidences flaws in the standard reform model, refuting its political compatibility and pointing to how it can increase opportunities for distorting the electricity-system.

Werewolves and warning signs: Cultural responses to tropical cyclones in Mauritius

The role that culture plays in the way different groups experience, respond to, and recover from disasters has been widely discussed. Yet, while there is a considerable (and growing) literature of case study evidence for the need to account for culture in disasters, comparatively few studies take a long-term perspective on cultural interactions with disasters, resulting in a lack of exploration into the diachronic nature of these cultural responses, both past and present. The literature that does exist tends also to focus either on western cultures or on groups that pursue highly traditional livelihoods. Communities that call on elements of both local or vernacular knowledge and scientific or external knowledge are underrepresented.This article presents an examination of cultural responses to tropical cyclones on Mauritius Island in the South West Indian Ocean over the long-term. We combine historical archive and contemporary interview data to uncover an extensive history of cultural responses to cyclones in Mauritius, including revealing the use of local knowledge, early warning signs, and superstitions surrounding cyclones in early Mauritian history and today.Our research refutes the portrayal of isolated ‘episodes’ of cultural responses to cyclones, such as the reports of ‘mass hysteria’ following tropical cyclone Hollanda in February 1994, when a considerable proportion of Mauritians believed that a werewolf or loup garou was terrorising villagers. Whilst this experience has been portrayed – both at the time and currently – as an embarrassing and one-off incident, we show that this is rather part of a long pattern of cultural responses to tropical cyclones. Our results therefore have implications for how cyclones and disasters are understood and experienced.

From Values to Value: The Commensuration of Sustainability Reporting and the Crowding Out of Morality

Drawing on extensive case study evidence, this study unpacks sustainability reporting’s evolution from a moral values–based practice toward a financialized value–based one. We argue that this transition can be seen as a commensuration project. We examine the dynamics of this process and its implications for sustainability-related outcomes. We find that increased levels of commensuration have moved sustainability reporting away from an original emphasis on morality and values to a focus on strategic value creation for the firm. We theorize this process as a “crowding out of morality” that is enabled by a rigid cognitive framing of social and environmental issues (objectification) and the monetized coordination of relevant social interactions (marketization). We outline implications of our analysis for the scholarly debates on the institutionalization of sustainability reporting and commensuration.

Public Opinion on Geopolitics and Trade

AbstractThis article provides a systematic examination of the role of security considerations in shaping mass preferences over international economic exchange. The authors employ multiple survey experiments conducted in the United States and India, along with observational and case study evidence, to investigate how geopolitics affects voters’ views of international trade. Their research shows that respondents consistently—and by large margins—prefer trading with allies over adversaries. Negative prior beliefs about adversaries, amplified by concerns that trade will bolster the partner's military, account for this preference. Yet the authors also find that a significant proportion of the public believes that trade can lead to peace and that the peace-inducing aspects of trade can cause voters to overcome their aversion to trade with adversaries. This article helps explain when and why governments constrained by public opinion pursue economic cooperation in the shadow of conflict.

Creative industries and resilience in times of crisis: the role of firm and entrepreneurial team characteristics

PurposeThis paper aims to identify firm and entrepreneurial team characteristics that may contribute to resilience in the creative industries (CI) under adverse economic conditions.Design/methodology/approachIt provides case study evidence based on 19 in-depth interviews with small and young creative enterprises in Greece in 2014 that is at the peak of the Greek economic crisis. New information was collected from two follow-up waves conducted in 2017 and during the recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic crisis.FindingsThe results suggest that highly internationalized entrepreneurial teams with extensive working and studying experience abroad, which also combine creative expertise with managerial and marketing expertise, are key resilience drivers during economic downturns. Moreover, being export-oriented, serving a diverse customer base and investing in digital technologies seem to allow CI firms to effectively adapt to challenging conditions.Originality/valueThis study adds to the firm-level research on the resilience drivers of small and young enterprises in the CI context. It proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework to advance the limited knowledge on entrepreneurship and resilience patterns in the CI during crisis periods, emphasizing specific entrepreneurial team and firm characteristics.

Nursing excellence: A knowledge-based view of developing a healthcare workforce

Building on the knowledge-based view (KBV), this research investigates the role of human resource management practices (HRM) and ambidextrous leadership in developing nursing excellence. By analyzing qualitative case study evidence from an emerging market tertiary healthcare provider in India and using interviews and secondary and non-participant observation data, we highlight how HRM practices created contextual ambidexterity, and ambidextrous leaders played a crucial network brokering role in integrating knowledge for building nursing excellence. Specific HRM practices supported the development of new common and specialist, and internal and external, knowledge by instilling specific values. Furthermore, ambidextrous leaders managed the paradoxes of experimentation and exploration by embedding nursing leadership into clinical practices for enhanced value creation and capture. This paper contributes to developing a conceptual framework of nursing excellence through the theoretical lenses of KBV, HRM and leader ambidexterity. The implications for research and practice are also discussed.

Institutional Investors in China: Corporate Governance and Policy Channeling in the Market Within the State

The extraordinary rise of China’s economy has made understanding Chinese corporate governance an issue of global importance. A rich literature has developed analyzing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) role as China’s largest controlling shareholder and the impact that this has on Chinese corporate governance. However, the CCP’s role as the architect—and direct and indirect controller—of institutional investors in China has been largely overlooked in the legal literature. This Article aims to take the first step in filling this gap in the literature by drawing on Chinese sources and fresh hand-collected empirical, interview, and case study evidence to analyze the meteoric rise of institutional investors in China. It provides a taxonomy of institutional investors in China and reveals how the market for institutional investors has grown and has become increasingly “atomized” as different types of institutional investors have proliferated. The Article reveals how the CCP has actively and gradually promoted the growth of domestic institutional investors, in terms of types and size, through the relaxation of policies and law reforms to improve corporate governance and stabilize the stock market, while limiting the influence of foreign institutional investors. It further analyzes all the Activist Campaigns undertaken by institutional investors in China and maps the network of government bodies, regulations, and tactics that the CCP has developed to directly and indirectly control State-Owned Institutional Investors (SOIIs) and Private-Owned Institutional Investors (POIIs) for the purpose of policy channeling. This Article concludes by taking a step back and briefly considering what this examination of institutional investors tells us about China’s unique form of capitalism and system of corporate governance. It suggests that the rise of institutional investors in China has been strategically developed in a way to reinforce the CCP’s ultimate control over the financial system. However, contrary to what some conceptions of “state capitalism” may suggest, the CCP does not micro-manage institutional investors on a day-to-day basis. Rather, institutional investors normally function according to free-market forces and increasingly perform an important corporate governance role—with the CCP using its policy channeling in a targeted way to stabilize the market in times of crisis, execute important legal and market reforms, and to maintain calm in society during critical political events: what this Article termed as the “market within the state” for institutional investors in China.

Tackling teachers’ low expectations of Black Caribbean students in English schools

The underachievement of Black Caribbean students has been a persistent problem facing national policymakers in English schools for many years. Drawing on case study evidence, this article has looked into the experience and views of teachers, parents, governors and school staff about the effect of teachers’ low expectations on Black Caribbean students and the reasons for their underachievement in English schools. Evidence suggests teachers’ low expectation is one of the factors that hindered the achievement of Black Caribbean students. Low expectations manifest in several ways, including harsher reprimands, racist stereotyping, unconscious and conscious bias, as well as being overlooked to answer questions, and is set in low ability groups. The recommendations from this study are that schools should challenge teachers through training and the effective use of an inclusive curriculum that provides students with knowledge about the histories, cultures and contributions of diverse groups.

Micronutrient-sensitive food value chains: A systematic review of intervention strategies and impact pathways to nutritional outcomes

Abstract Knowledge and evidence on how food value chains can deliver nutrition, especially micronutrients, are limited. A deeper understanding of the food value chains as part of agri-food systems approaches addressing hunger and malnutrition through agricultural development may provide pathways for nutrition and health outcomes.. This systematic review was undertaken using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) to assess the broad topic of value chains and micronutrients, focusing on interventions and their related impact pathways. Impact pathway interventions improving micronutrient delivery and consumption were classified as production, accessibility, marketing, income, knowledge and behavioral, and finally, women’s empowerment pathways. However, the case study evidence on the micronutrient-sensitive value chains for nutritional outcomes is very scant. This review identified that making value chains micronutrient-sensitive requires a multi-stakeholder, integrated approach as a basis for concerted action among various stakeholders in terms of policy, research, strengthening partnerships and coordination, and information sharing. The review illustrates the scarcity of literature with a focus on the micronutrients in the context of food value chains and developing countries. The food value chain approach offers great potential to unpack the complexity of food systems and identify entry points and pathways for improving nutrition outcomes, especially the micronutrients. Additionally, this review identifies multiple entry points and calls for strong advocacy of nutrition-sensitive value chain approaches to combat hidden hunger.

Connections Between System of System Sustainability and Resilience in an Electric Motor Manufacturing Supply Chain

Systems of Systems combine constituent systems (such as financial, transportation, energy, food, and water) to improve performance. System of Systems employment, however, often requires additional material and infrastructure investment. Due to their widespread use, it is essential that Systems of Systems are sustainable. One approach to increasing Systems of Systems sustainability is to increase its resilience (e.g. a less-resilient System of Systems would require additional resources to recover from a fault). The need for increased Systems of Systems resilience inspired our research question: How does SoS resilience change environmental impact during post-fault operation? To examine this research question, a model of an electric motor supply chain is examined. The supply chain architecture is divided into two parallel supply chains servicing four distribution centers. If supply to a distribution center is disrupted, the non-impacted supply chain can provide motors, but at a changed use-phase impact due to new shipping routes (e.g. further geographic distance). To answer our research question, each of the 14 constituents were disrupted one at a time, supply rerouting occurred as necessary, and the change in operational impact is reported (additional km of supply chain travel per week. This study provides key evidence that even if System of System infrastructure repair could occur without impact, changes in operational impact is an important factor for decision makers. Additionally, this paper provides case study evidence supporting the claim that improved resilience can improve System of Systems sustainability.

Constraining labour: The integration dynamics of working‐class horticultural migrants in rural areas of Norway, the UK and the US

AbstractThis article argues that many low‐wage migrants moving to work in rural areas of the developed world end up in very specific and precarious employment and housing contexts: working in temporary/seasonal jobs within horticultural labour markets and often living in employer‐provided tied accommodation. This context—which we profile by drawing on qualitative case study evidence from Norway, the UK and the US—makes integration virtually impossible. It is only after moving on from precarious temporary/seasonal work and out from tied accommodation that rural integration becomes viable. Yet even then, the integration of these workers is often limited. Migrants are largely ‘quarantined’ and separate and invisible from the host society. Not surprisingly, migrants tend to treat their lack of rural integration as ‘liminal’, that is, a temporary and in‐between life stage. They also engage in ‘transnational simultaneity’ by maintaining family/communal relations back home, whilst focusing largely on work in the host country. This liminality and transnational simultaneity help working‐class migrants survive their quarantined lives.

Assessing the impacts of donor support on Nigeria's health system: The global fund in perspective

AbstractFrom 2003 to 2019, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (the “Global Fund”) disbursed a total of US$2.3 billion in grants to Nigeria, mainly for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. This paper examines the impacts of the Global Fund's interventions on Nigeria's health system. Case study evidence shows that while the Global Fund has been successful in achieving its specific performance targets, its impacts on Nigeria's health system has been minimal at best. Major reasons for its negligible impacts on the country's health system include the Global Fund's ambivalent operational structure, little input from the host country in program design, excessive focus on fiduciary matters as opposed to public health interventions, as well as emphasis on parochial performance targets. Policy implications arising from this study include the need for domestic actors in Nigeria's health sector to have significant input in designing the Global Fund's projects in the country. In addition, the Global Fund's board and major donors should work collaboratively to refocus the institution to enhance its public health impacts.

Reducing non-residential asset sanitisation water footprint for improved public health in water-deficient cities

• Access to water-based sanitisation is disproportionately distributed in cities. • UV-based technology offers sustainable solution for sanitising public assets. • Long-term pandemic preparation requires alternative to water-based sanitisation. • Balancing public health sanitisation water footprint needs strategic planning. This paper evaluates the potential for reconfiguring city-scale clean water demand by reducing the non-residential asset sanitsation water footprint. A novel methodological framework is proposed for assessing the feasibility of a mix of three surface sanitisation measures (Manual surface wiping, Mechanical cleaning/Rapid disinfectant spraying, Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation-UVGI treatment) in terms of a Sanitisation waterfootprint index (SWI); three typical application scenarios are considered – high risk-high frequency, moderate risk-moderate frequency, moderate risk-low frequency. The UVGI treatment outperforms the other two surface treatment methods, particularly in high risk-high frequency scenario in the healthcare setting, with SWI as low as 2%. Further, case-study evidence from a ward-level spatial analysis using real-world data estimates SWI ranging between 0-30% in those wards with greater commercial/public assets, showing clear merit of this framework in re-configuring city-scale public health sanitisation water footprint. A cost-benefit analysis (involving resources – staffing, water and chemicals; capital expenditure, and energy costs) shows superior performance of UVGI treatment over the other two methods from the second year onwards, surpassing the initial cost-effectiveness for corresponding manual or mechanical cleaning. Wider implementation of this framework can foster strategic transformation of city-scale water footprint, which is deemed essential for ensuring sustainable growth of water deficient cities globally.

Cross-National Perspectives on Aging and Place: Implications for Age-Friendly Cities and Communities.

The age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC) agenda has led to a range of policy initiatives aimed at supporting aging in place for older people. While there is case study evidence of how people age across urban contexts, there has been little research exploring cross-national understandings of age-friendly places among older people. The objective of this article is to identify the place experiences of older people living across cities and communities in India, Brazil, and the United Kingdom and to discuss implications for the AFCC agenda. A total of 300 semistructured interviews were undertaken with older people across 9 cities and 27 communities in India, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis undertaken by each national team and then discussed and revised at collaborative workshops with researchers from each of the 3 country teams. The data capture the ways in which place is constructed from the perspective of older people drawing upon social, community, and cultural dimensions of aging across diverse urban environments. We explore how older people negotiate place in the context of their everyday life and identify the relational and interconnected ways in which place attachment, belonging, and identity are constructed. Age-friendly interventions need to attend to the changing physical, social and cultural dimensions of aging and place. Integrated place-making practices are required to support older people to age in the right place across rapidly transforming urban contexts globally.

Value and sustainability in technology-enabled care services: a case study from north-east England

IMPACT A critical barrier to the large-scale adoption of technology-enabled care services (TECS) remains a lack of evidence around their business cases that would create sufficient value for the stakeholders involved. Drawing on a case study of telecare service delivery, involving public funding and institutions in north east England, the authors highlight the opportunities that technology provides, as well as a series of challenges that need to be addressed. The findings will be particularly helpful for telecare stakeholders, shaping how services are provided.

Contesting large-scale land acquisitions in the Global South

• The analysis synthesizes the case study literature to explain how communities contest large-scale agricultural investment. • Communities use varied tactics, mostly from the repertoires of everyday resistance, collective action, and rights-based means. • Rural communities face unfavorable circumstances for organized protests. • Certain political opportunities and involvement of local leaders enable contentious collective action or rights-based resistance. As agricultural investors have acquired large tracts of land in the Global South recently, many affected communities and civil society groups have contested what they perceive as land grabbing. These communities have struggled to retain their land, protect their livelihoods, or benefit from the investment. There has been much academic interest in these conflicts. Studying the emerging literature, this review identifies the main theoretical perspectives and synthesizes the case study evidence. The goal is to better understand how communities contest large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and to explain their tactics. For this purpose, a sample was collected that consists of 46 studies and 28 LSLA cases from the Global South. Since most of these studies adopt single theoretical perspectives from resistance research, the present study links multiple theoretical strands, most importantly everyday resistance, contentious politics, and legal mobilization. Based on the cases reviewed, the analysis shows that the tactics of contention are diverse but can also be grouped into three repertoires. It is found that affected communities use everyday resistance mostly when they face particularly unfavorable circumstances. In contrast, certain political opportunities and involvement of local leaders enable organized protests through either collective action or rights-based contention. Overall, this study contributes to the literature not only by bringing together case observations to see the big picture, but also by identifying the main repertoires, tentative frequencies of tactics, and less relevant circumstances and mechanisms. In practical terms, the findings suggest that development and civil society actors can play important roles for assisting rural populations and local leaders in fending off land grabs.

Comprehensive private schooling for low-income children: Experimental case-study evidence from Mexico

We use first-grade lottery-based admissions to estimate impacts and cost-effectiveness of a subsidized comprehensive private school for low-income children in Mexico City, part of a philanthropic organization supporting and operating similar schools worldwide. Relative to students who did not win the lottery, CHM lottery winners gain additional 0.18 SD in literacy and 0.09 SD in numeracy over the first three years of elementary school. Parents of lottery winners are more likely to report children’s school is academically demanding, rate the school higher and have greater expectations of children’s college completion. Achievement gains come at an increased cost relative to counterfactual public schools of $1000/pupil-year, which suggests low cost-effectiveness. Higher cost is explained by greater array of services and few economies of scale. Despite the high per student cost, this robust case study suggests philanthropic private schools have great potential to improve achievement amongst the region’s most vulnerable students and reduce longstanding learning and opportunity gaps.