Collective Assets Research Articles

The Embedding of Transnational Entrepreneurs in Diaspora Networks: Leveraging the Assets of Foreignness

In this paper we examine how foreign actors capitalize on their ethnic identity to gain skills and capabilities that enable them to operate in a new and strange environment. We explore the mechanisms by which Bulgarian entrepreneurs in London use their ethnic identity to develop competitive advantage and business contacts. We find that the entrepreneurs studied gain access to a diaspora network, which enables them to develop essential business capabilities and integrate knowledge from both home and host country environments. The diaspora community possesses a collective asset (transactive memory) that allows its members to remove competition from the interfirm level to the network level (i.e., diaspora networks vs. networks of native businesspeople). Additionally, the cultural identity and networks to which community members have access provide bridging capabilities that allow diaspora businesspeople to make links to host country business partners and thus embed themselves in the host country environment. Thus, this paper adds to the growing body of work showing how foreignness can serve as an asset in addition to its better-known role as a liability.

Leveraging the Assets of Foreignness in the Transnational Domain

In this paper, we examine how foreign actors capitalize on their ethnic identity to gain skills and capabilities that enable them to operate in a new and strange environment. We explore the mechanisms by which Bulgarian entrepreneurs in London use their ethnic identity to develop competitive advantage and business contacts. We find that the entrepreneurs studied gain access to a diaspora network, which enables them to develop essential business capabilities and integrate knowledge from both home and host country environments. The diaspora community possesses a collective asset (transactive memory) that allows its members to remove competition from the interfirm level to the network level (i.e., diaspora networks vs. networks of native businesspeople). Additionally, the cultural identity and networks to which community members have access provide bridging capabilities that allow diaspora businesspeople to make links to host country business partners and thus embed themselves in the host country environment...

SOBRE LA EVOLUCIÓN DE LA PROTECCIÓN PENAL DE LOS BIENES JURÍDICOS SUPRAINDIVIDUALES. PRECISIONES Y LIMITACIONES PREVIAS PARA UNA PROPUESTA DE PROTECCIÓN PENAL DEL ORDEN PÚBLICO ECONÓMICO EN CHILE

After defining and establishing the central methodological concepts, this paper aims to establish the main forms of conceiving supraindividual criminal protection of legal assets. That is to say, realistic and substantial conception on the protection of so-called diffuse interests, to formalizing conception provided by the notion of collective legal assets. Additionally, based on this prior discussion, it is intended to clarify and define the essential elements of a future proposal on the protection of public economic order as a possible legal collective asset. To conclude, the changes and the necessary distinctions that are required for the implementation of such notion in our legal system are pointed out.

The Civil Liability of Asset Managers A Polish Perspective

This paper focuses on the civil liability of asset managers in Polish law. Following the transformation of the economic system and the development of the capital market in Poland, the importance of asset management has been gradually increasing, though it remains disproportionally lower when compared to the role of collective asset management in the form of investment funds. The chief purpose of both MiFID directives is to harmonise the rules applicable to investment firms providing brokerage services in Europe, and to protect the interests of investors using brokerage services. Although the civil liability of investment firms offering brokerage services is part of what is broadly construed as investor protection, the regulations on this matter have been left to the member states’ discretion. There is no doubt that discrepancies between member states in this respect diminish the harmonising effect of both directives. This paper sets out to determine the basic rules of civil liability of asset managers in Polish law, and present suggestions for the most common problems in this field.

Challenges of Research Collaboration in Ghana’s Knowledge-based Economy

The purpose of this study was to examine the challenges of research collaboration from the perspective of academic researchers who engage in research collaboration with knowledge users. The study design was descriptive and comprised an explanatory sequential mixed methods approach made up of a survey of a proportionate stratified sample of academic researchers and key informants from two public universities in Ghana. On the basis of responses from 127 academics with collaborative research experience and 11 key informants, it was established through principal component analysis that collective assets, such as lack of common values and trust, followed by structural and positional factors, such as limited funding and inadequate infrastructure, were key challenges of research collaboration. The challenges of research collaboration point to the existence of clash of values between academics and knowledge users and to the absence of comprehensive national and institutional support systems for research collaboration. The persistence of the challenges will widen the knowledge filter in the economy and can eventually result in a Swedish paradox.

Rethinking displacement in peri-urban transformation in China

This article examines the spatiality of peri-urban villages in Guangzhou, offering an analysis that critically rethinks displacement as a phenomenon that need not be bracketed by the narrow spatial understanding of “physical uprootedness.” Building on ethnographic fieldwork research in Yonghe village, this article identifies and examines three mechanisms and forms of marginalization and dispossession that Chinese villagers have experienced during in situ urbanization: (1) large-scale expropriation of farmland to economic development zones in the mid-1980s; (2) subjection of collective assets to industrial land use by the planning authority since 1991; (3) on-going exposure to industrial pollution. The analysis shows that each of these factors is contingent on the previous one, and that villagers’ engagement with recent injustices cannot be separated from their disadvantaged positions in the past. This article argues that, while overt displacement by state-led development is a clear violation of the “right to the city,” in situ marginalization and dispossession without physical uprooting is equally problematic and exploitative.

Why Did Better Place Fail?: Range anxiety, interpretive flexibility, and electric vehicle promotion in Denmark and Israel

With almost $1 billion in funding, Better Place was poised to become one of the most innovative companies in the electric mobility market. The system Better Place proposed had two novel prongs; first, to reduce the cost of batteries, and second, to reduce range anxiety, public infrastructure concerns, and long charging times. Yet, despite this seemingly strong combination, Better Place failed to make any progress in Denmark and Israel, the first two markets it operated in, and subsequently declared bankruptcy, selling off its collective assets for less than $500,000. Drawing from science and technology studies and the notion of “interpretive flexibility,” this paper posits several reasons to explain the failure of Better Place, including that Denmark is not as “green” as it seems nor is the Israeli market as attractive as believed, and that Better Place's solution to charging time and range anxiety resolved a psychological, not a functional, barrier of the general public to adopt electric vehicles. Before investigating these two reasons, the paper presents a short history of Better Place and explores the contours of its operations in Denmark and Israel. It then discusses why Better Place “failed” across both countries before concluding with implications for energy planning, policy, and analysis.

Responsabilidade civil ambiental em paralelo: contextos normativo-regulamentar e social no Brasil, Áustria e Suíça

The environment as a legal asset and the juridical remedy for its breach have distinguishably evolved in European agreements and domestic law in comparison to Brazil’s legal system, despite of the harmonizing goal of the declarations and treaties emanated from supranational organizations. The juridical standard designed by this international approach pursues correspondence and exchangeability between nations of the globe, in spite of the obvious discrepancies in the social and environmental agendas of developed and developing countries. The quality and quantity of the legal production connected to the environment in Brazil, Switzerland and Austria declare a relevant association with community bonds. In this paper, deductive reasoning as well as qualitative and comparative methodologies were used in the compilation of all international norms and domestic laws and acts of each examined state. The major objective is to reveal Brazil’s reality in comparison to the Austrian and Swiss contexts, show relevant data and perspectives in relation to the asymmetry of juridical and collective cohesion and provide a refl exive construction on common and collective assets. Keywords: liability, environment, International Law.

The politics of the shareholding collective economy in China's rural villages

Since the early 2000s, the collective economy, assets or property rights have gone through shareholding reform in an increasing number of China's rural villages. There are two main types of the shareholding economy. One type is the Cooperative of Shareholding Economy (CSE) that quantifies the total value of the village's collective assets and turns them into stocks to be distributed among all the villagers. Another type is the Shareholding Land Cooperative (SLC), which peasants spontaneously organized in some regions and voluntarily joined with their land-use contracts. Both types aim to turn ordinary villagers into the shareholders and thereby the genuine owners of the collective economy or assets. The SLC serves another purpose, which is to achieve economies of scale for agricultural production through reconcentration of village land. While the effects of the shareholding reform in empowering peasants are varied and limited, it does have the potential to make village governance more democratic.

A Rawlsian Defense of the Individual Mandate: The “Collective Asset” Approach

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires individuals to get coverage or pay a fine (or “shared responsibility payment”) starting in 2014. This mandate had been at the center of a contentious political and legal debate. Although the Mandate is key to ending discriminations based on pre-existing conditions in the individual insurance market, its constitutionality had been challenged. We argue that the Obama administration's legal argument for the constitutionality of the Mandate by invoking conventional economic categories such as “negative externalities” is inadequate in addressing the economic and moral significance of the Mandate. As an alternative, we suggest a Rawlsian approach. Specifically, we will borrow the Rawlsian notion of “collective asset” to articulate the moral appeal of the Mandate and its social insurance logic.

Reconsolidation of state power into urbanising villages: Shareholding reforms as a strategy for governance in the Pearl River Delta region

Shareholding Cooperatives (SCs) are the officially recognised organisations responsible for managing villagers’ collectively owned assets. In recent years, massive land requisitions in the Pearl River Delta region have led many villages to experience a rapid expansion in their collective assets, highlighting the indispensable role of SCs in reshaping the landscape of local governance. Based upon an in-depth case study of the Guangzhou Luogang District, this study shows that the local state has engaged with shareholding reforms to achieve two main objectives: inducing compliance amongst villagers and promoting the accountability of village cadres in the management of collective assets. These empirical findings suggest that shareholding reforms were not simply a process of market building or property rights reforms driven by local initiatives. Rather, they should also be interpreted as a process of state power reconsolidation, whereby the local government sought to regain its control over the urbanising villages.

PARTNERSHIPS: MARRYING THE STRENGTHS AND RESOURCES OF DIVERSE INTEREST GROUPS

This paper explores the growing importance of partnership development within the social services sector in Australia. It proposes that the social, political and economic factors giving rise to shifting priorities in this newly named third sector are encapsulated in the notion of social entrepreneurship being given impetus by the Federal Government’s policy of mutual obligation, the findings of the Welfare Reform Group and the consequent Australians Working Together programme. It argues that community development is the ideal strategy for partnership development that fits well with the strengths perspective, where the emphasis is on mutual engagement in an equal relationship such that the collective assets and resources of the collaborating partners can be harnessed for the good of the community. The parallels between partnerships and human relationships are outlined and the role of the key sectors of community, business, government and non-government in the provision of social services are discussed. The paper ends with a discussion of community-business partnership development. Partnerships are seen to offer social workers with opportunities and challenges in the development of creative and innovative programmes aimed at social improvement.

Does Financial Market Development Explain (or at Least Predict) the Demand for Wealth Management and Private Banking Services in Developing Markets?

How should wealth managers and private bankers find and serve the wealthy – particularly in developing countries? Several banks and consulting firms provide market sizing estimates for the number of high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals. However, it is still an open question whether financial management services actually create wealth (or increase the number of wealthy persons). How can financial advisors know if, on a macro-level, their service offerings grow their collective assets under management and increase their prospect numbers? In this paper, we find evidence that advanced wealth management and private banking services might help grow a wirehouse’s book of business in developed, but not developing, markets. If wealth management and private banking follow general trends affecting the broader financial sector, their business also grows wealth in less advanced economies. Such evidence sheds light on the currently ambiguous role that financial development seems to play in creating affluent, high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals.

Sustainable Development and Capabilities for the Polar Region

The paper develops a sustainable development framework for individual and collective capabilities in mixed subsistence and wage-based economies. We apply this framework to such regions of the Arctic and evaluate interactions and conflicts between two sectors of the mixed economy and between current and future generations of Arctic inhabitants. A recent Arctic Social Indicators Report published by the Arctic Human Development Report (AHDR) Task Force recognizes the importance of the mixed economy in the Arctic and aims to integrate collective assets, as well as individual assets in order to understand the human development in the Arctic. Yet due to its concerns of comparability of social development and data availability across the whole Arctic region (of which some parts do not have the similar population structure), its proposed indicators are not capable of covering the social development of predominantly indigenous regions of the North. We emphasize the importance of tracking collective capabilities, as well as individual capabilities to sustain community development. In addition we suggest that environmental sustainability, which is ignored by the AHDR Task Force, has to be integrated with social development as environmental deterioration significantly influences the social well-being and cultural stability of traditional inhabitants of the Arctic. We critically review the proposed indicators of the AHDR Task Force and make supplementary and alternative suggestions.

The ‘age of the market’ and the regime of debt: the role of credit in the transformation of pastoral Mongolia1

Since the decollectivisation of the rural economy in the 1990s, Mongolian pastoralists have become subject to the new property regime of the ‘age of the market’ (). Formerly collective assets, such as livestock, machinery and buildings, have become private property and land is increasingly becoming a resource available for private ownership. International finance and development agencies have advocated credit schemes for pastoralists faced with uneven annual income and the servicing of debt has become a central burden for an increasing number of Mongolian households. In the neoliberal era, the pastoral sector has become highly vulnerable to climatic variation. The distribution of environmental risks alongside processes of collateralisation has expanded the sphere of monetised relations and made pastoralists dependent upon increasingly global markets for commodities and credit. This new regime of debt has interesting historical parallels with the Qing‐era barter trade that impoverished pre‐revolutionary Mongolia.

Chicago Cultural Alliance Promoting Social Change and Cultural Diversity

The Chicago Cultural Alliance (CCA) is a unique consortium, uniting 29 community-based ethnic museums, cultural centers, and historical societies with 18 mainstream cultural institutions. CCA's mission is to effect positive social change and public understanding of cultural diversity through the first-voice perspectives of its members. It provides a new model for collaboration that values the assets of ethnic organizations as equal to the professional expertise of mainstream institutions and harnesses these collective assets to deliver programs that meet both sets of organizations' needs. Through its civic dialogue program ( Talking About...) CCA provides a template for members to collaborate on cross-cultural programs which explore the intersection of contemporary civic issues with cultural heritage. Using Talking About... as an example, we examine CCA's Civic Engagement Model, specifically addressing efforts to build members' capacity to engage with issues of contemporary significance and include the diverse voices located within their respective ethnic communities.

The Role of NGOs and Civil Society in Development and Poverty Reduction

Since the late 1970s, NGOs have played an increasingly prominent role in the development sector, widely praised for their strengths as innovative and grassroots-driven organisations with the desire and capacity to pursue participatory and people-centred forms of development and to fill gaps left by the failure of states across the developing world in meeting the needs of their poorest citizens. While levels of funding for NGO programmes in service delivery and advocacy work have increased alongside the rising prevalence and prominence of NGOs, concerns regarding their legitimacy have also increased. There are ongoing questions of these comparative advantages, given their growing distance away from low-income people and communities and towards their donors. In addition, given the non-political arena in which they operate, NGOs have had little participation or impact in tackling the more structurally-entrenched causes and manifestations of poverty, such as social and political exclusion, instead effectively depoliticising poverty by treating it as a technical problem that can be ‘solved.’ How, therefore, can NGOs ‘return to their roots’ and follow true participatory and experimental paths to empowerment? As this paper explores, increasingly, NGOs are recognised as only one, albeit important, actor in civil society. Success in this sphere will require a shift away from their role as service providers to that of facilitators and supporters of broader civil society organisations through which low-income communities themselves can engage in dialogue and negotiations to enhance their collective assets and capabilities.

Management teaching, the spiritual dimension and the acceptance of the Islamic other

This article aims to provide a reminder of other traditions of spirituality and the contemplative in ethical questions in business, and to suggest some opportunities for re-introducing these themes into the work of business schools. It is timely to go beyond the Western emphases on management and knowledge rooted in positivistic epistemologies and in individualistic ‘rational actor’ models of organizational action in which economic goal-orientation and objective-targeted behaviours are assumed to be universal human characteristics. It reviews some of the foundational principles of management in the Islamic world, as Islam represents a comprehensive worldview and a basis for cultural and behavioural universality. In particular, I note the Islamic approach to wealth, seen as a collective and community asset within the responsibility of the Ummah, the Wasta approach to mediation and influence in social networks and the concern for the interests of the generalized other.

Optimization of Equity Redeterminations Through Fit-for-Purpose Evaluation Procedures

Summary Equity redetermination is most commonly encountered where a straddling field is developed as a discrete entity through a process of unitization. It is enacted through evaluation procedures that prescribe the technical methodology for requantifying different license shares, or tract participations, in a field unit as more data become available. The formulation of these procedures usually takes place at unitization, it is based on appraisal data, and, therefore, it is guided by simplified perceptions of reservoir character. For this reason, many such technical procedures have been found to be lacking when they are applied later at the equity redetermination stage. These shortcomings can take the form of ambiguous wording, misleading definitions, technically inappropriate specifications, contradictory prescription, or simply a lack of sufficient detail to render the intended process meaningful. They have impeded the determination of revised tract participations by triggering interlicense disagreements that might otherwise have been avoided. With the objective of reducing this unhelpful impact, experience of redetermination situations is used to illustrate the nature and consequences of poorly constructed procedures for the recomputation of tract participations. The analysis is then flipped to generate a framework of key elements of technical procedures together with indications of how they are best implemented. These matters form the basis for a high-level set of protocols for a more efficient and effective redetermination of equity that would avoid the previously encountered shortcomings. The protocols encompass the proper incorporation of data character, a sound technical basis for redetermination, a balance between under- and over-prescription, an auditable deterministic ethos, and adherence to good international petroleum practice. They constitute recommendations for a better approach to the compilation of fit-for-purpose evaluation procedures within those unitization agreements that make provision for a future redetermination of equity. The recommendations are equally applicable to domestic and international unitizations. The principal benefit lies in an enhanced efficiency of the equity-redetermination process, which feeds through to a greater collective asset value.

Application of the Need and Asset Model to Church-Based HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control

The recent global focus on the promotion of faith-based health and social interventions requires two major empirical data sets: (a), an understanding of how the health needs of churches relate to the assets they hold and (b) the collective capacity of members to use needed resources to help address a wide range of health issues including HIV/AIDS that continue to challenge many African countries' already limited health-related resources. In this study, we hypothesized that if Nigerian churches have less stated perceived needs in relation to more perceived assets that could be used for HIV/AIDS prevention and control, they would have greater collective efficacy and engage in more HIV/AIDS prevention and control activities. Estimates of churches' perceived needs, assets, collective efficacy, and activities as reported by church members from 81 Nigerian churches were aggregated. The linear regression method was used to test if needs and assets predicted collective efficacy and HIV/AIDS activities. The sum of church needs was positively related to collective efficacy (p < .01) and assets and collective efficacy predicted more HIV/AIDS–related activities (p < .01). Churches that had more members with a university education and those who had longer average church membership times had lower reported HIV/AIDS–related activity. The unexpected positive relationship between needs and collective efficacy in this cross-sectional study could be the result of those with higher collective efficacy having thought more about how to engage in HIV/AIDS prevention and control activities and, thus, being more aware of their needs.