Turbulent Context Research Articles

Intersections of Feminisms and Neoliberalism: Post-State-Socialist Estonia in a Transnational Feminist Framework

Intersections of Feminisms and NeoliberalismPost-State-Socialist Estonia in a Transnational Feminist Framework Raili Marling (bio) and Redi Koobak (bio) The first European Feminist Research Conference took place in August 1991 in Aalborg, Denmark. More than ninety women from Eastern Europe were invited as well, including several women from Estonia, for whom this was their first trip abroad and their first encounter with international academic feminist circles. In an emotional interview, a sociologist from Estonia recalled arriving at the conference center on August 19 to find Eastern European women crying.1 There was panic, fear and despair. She recounted that CNN was only showing news from Moscow and there was silence about what was happening in the Baltic states. The organizers were compassionate and trying to be helpful but did not fully grasp the circumstances. The contrast between the day and the night was indescribable: during the day, sitting among hundreds of European feminists, being taken aback by the variety of issues that seemed totally alien to her, and at night, sitting by the phone, trying to reach her loved ones back home in the heady days when Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union. This scene from the oral history project that traces the various trajectories of Estonian feminisms since the 1990s evokes the turbulent context of postsocialist transformations in which feminism reemerged in Estonia.2 Building on this research, we are interested in exploring the changing position of Estonian feminisms within the post-state-socialist period, characterized by predominance of a neoliberal ethos in the political sphere.3 In particular, we anchor our discussion in the complex interplay of various localized feminisms and the country's neoliberal consensus. The neoliberal framework has also shaped the development of alternative social philosophies and movements, among them feminisms largely focused on individual rights of women in a context that has discouraged economic and class-based critiques. This creates interesting parallels with recent US analyses on the emergence of neoliberal feminism and its role in the erosion of social justice.4 For example, Hester Eisenstein [End Page 1] claims that feminist vocabulary of women's personal empowerment has been used to facilitate neoliberal globalization.5 In Estonia, we suggest, the neoliberal context has created feminisms that have gradually expanded out of the narrow confines of "feminism-by-design" that is aligned with the agenda of the neoliberal elites of the country toward eventually gaining a more radical voice to raise uncomfortable questions about economic inequality and global power relations. As our opening story indicates, the reemergence of Estonian feminism is inextricably interwoven with the narratives of Estonia regaining independence from the Soviet regime, and it exists in a larger transnational context that both embraces and misreads it. We believe that focusing our discussion on the intersections of feminisms and neoliberalism in the Estonian context also raises a larger question of how to talk about issues at the level of the nation-state in the wider context of transnational feminist theory that has, from its inception, been committed to breaking from nation-centric visions of the world and to "destabilizing fixed geographies and seeing the intersections and hybridity of power."6 While feminist praxis in Estonia has been enriched by international academic and activist knowledge-formation, it has at the same time remained very Estonia-centered and Eurocentric. The prevalent focus on the nation-state and (Western) Europe has thus discouraged critical dialogues between Estonian feminists and transnational feminist theory. As a result, the failure to engage with critical transnational feminist paradigms has cut feminist discourses in Estonia off from productive critiques of coloniality and neoliberalism, at least until recently. Another broader issue we engage with is that most transnational feminist analyses have tended to marginalize the perspectives from post-state-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).7 They thereby become complicit in erasing certain parts of the world, and ways of life, from the realm of relevant knowledge.8 According to Jennifer Suchland, for instance, the critical language of transnational feminism recreates Cold War–era "three-worlds metageography" in its articulation of place, difference, and power, conflating the "third world" with the "transnational."9 Suchland sees the reasons for the...

Critiquing the Bank: 60 Years of BNDES in the Academy

AbstractThis article offers a critical analysis of scholarship produced about Brazil's Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES) since its founding, in 1952, to 2013. BNDES has performed an important, if changing and sometimes controversial, role in Brazil's economic development over the past 60 years, especially as provider of long-term finance. This analysis of almost 1,000 texts highlights discussions about its initial organisation and mission and how the role and activities of the bank changed over time, guided by turbulent national political and economic contexts. In spite of the bank's institutional importance, however, the literature is more narrative than analytical and of limited scholarly impact, dominated as it is by the bank's authorship. We argue for independent, evidence-driven, critical analyses of the effectiveness of this important institution in promoting Brazil's economic and social development.

The political economy of regime survival: Algeria in the context of the African and Arab uprisings

This briefing analyses the ways in which the Algerian regime has navigated the multi-dimensional crisis it has been faced with over the last two decades, and the political economy of its survival in a turbulent regional and international geopolitical context characterised by the African and Arab uprisings and the reaction of status quo forces to this phenomenon.

Identification and development of Lean and Safety projects

Nowadays, healthcare systems are forced to perform highly from dissimilar perspectives. Solutions that combine diverse managerial approaches could be helpful to face this challenge. To this extent, this paper aims at studying how to implement Health Lean Management (HLM) projects with benefits of Clinical Risk Management (CRM). Considering the innovativeness of the topic, a multiple case study has been conducted selecting HLM projects with patient safety improvements (L&S projects) from operative units of different hospitals. Data were collected by executing semi-structured interviews. In-depth interviews, observations and analysis of relevant documentation were also performed to triangulate the information about hospital context, organizational and managerial aspects. Based on these data, a cross-case analysis was performed. Categorizing the cases, three clusters with distinguishing profiles emerged. Significant propositions were grasped highlighting the organizational and managerial characteristics of L&S projects. In particular, cases regarding front-office processes show distinct features and projects with intentional direct impacts on patient safety report peculiar characteristics, highlighting the need of CRM involvement to achieve multiple objectives. Besides interesting common evidences, indications distinguished by clusters are delineated. Patient safety improvements are intentionally obtained by managing wastes and errors, while they are unexpectedly reached by identifying and solving organizational issues. This research contributes to define guidelines for implementing L&S projects, which are still missing in literature, but which constitute a support for hospital managers who operate in a complex and turbulent context.

Co je dnes v sociologii obhajitelné? Prezentismus, historická vize a proč je sociologie užitečná

In recent years, sociology in Britain – and in national contexts influenced by British sociology – has been diagnosed by various parties as suffering from a wide range of ailments. These forms of selfcriticism become ever more acute in terms of their potential effects as huge transformations in university funding regimes are brought to bear on the social sciences. But none of these critiques engages satisfactorily with what is a much more foundational and serious set of problems, namely the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production. Sociology claims to know the world around it, but in Britain today much sociology seriously fails in this regard, because it operates with radically curtailed understandings of the long-term historical forces which made the social conditions it purports to analyse. A sophisticated understanding of the contemporary world is made possible only by an equally sophisticated understanding of very long-term historical processes, precisely the sort of vision that mainstream British sociology has lacked for at least the last two decades. This paper identifies the reasons for the development of this situation and the consequences it has for the nature of sociology’s knowledge production, for its self-understanding, for its claims to comprehend the contemporary world, and for its apparent social “usefulness”. A markedly more selfaware and historically-sensitive sociology is proposed as the answer to the pressing question of what aspects of sociology should be defended in the turbulent context of British higher education today.

INTERDISCIPLINARIDADE NO ENSINO EM ADMINISTRAÇÃO: VISÃO DE ESPECIALISTAS E COORDENADORES DE CURSOS DE GRADUAÇÃO

Cursos de graduação em administração estão inseridos em contextos turbulentos e apresentam dificuldades em gerir recursos e competências de diferentes naturezas. Uma das questões mais enfáticas é a capacidade de aperfeiçoar a formação do estudante para os desafios da profissão de gestão. Sintomas como dissociação entre teoria e prática, falta de sequência lógica de conteúdo, excesso de aulas expositivas e incapacidade para desenvolver no aluno as habilidades demandadas pelo mercado são sempre lembrados nas críticas ao trabalho realizado por eles. Por sua vez, a interdisciplinaridade, tratada como promoção controlada de relações entre diferentes conteúdos disciplinar, hoje considerada mais processo que produto (fazenda, 1991; 2006), visa desenvolver o pensamento complexo capaz de entender a realidade sistêmica, relacionando elementos presentes em diferentes áreas. Por meio das práticas interdisciplinares, o ensino em Administração poderia superar os problemas de formação apresentados, ou ao menos, reduzi-los. Dessa forma, este trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar a visão de especialistas, membros de grupos de pesquisa em interdisciplinaridade, e coordenadores de cursos de administração por meio de entrevistas pessoais e método Delphi com formulário preenchido online. Como resultados, foi possível afirmar que os especialistas não distinguem a interdisciplinaridade aplicada em diferentes contextos da aplicada no ensino em administração; e que, os coordenadores de cursos apoiam a ideia, mas têm dificuldades estruturais e organizacionais de realiza-las. Por fim, o ensino em administração na visão de ambos carece de maior interdisciplinaridade, mas para que isso mude seria necessária uma reforma na estrutura das matrizes curriculares dos cursos, como também empreendimento dos professores com maior foco à graduação em detrimento da pós-graduação além de uma inflexão dos métodos didáticos utilizados em sala de aula, tornando-os mais centrados no aluno do que intensos na figura do professor, eliminando o excesso de aulas expositivas. Iniciativas que proporcionem o pensamento sistêmico sejam na extensão ou em casos de estudo podem fortalecer a interdisciplinaridade no ensino em administração.

Longitudinal associations between employees’ beliefs about the quality of the change management process, affective commitment to change and psychological empowerment

Organizational changes are costly ventures that too often fail to deliver the expected outcomes. Psychological empowerment and affective commitment to change are proposed as especially important in turbulent contexts characterized by multiple and ongoing changes requiring employees’ continuing contributions. In such a context, employees’ beliefs that the changes are necessary, legitimate and will be supported, are presumed to increase psychological empowerment and affective commitment to change. In a three-wave longitudinal panel study of 819 employees, we examined autoregressive and cross-lagged relations among latent constructs reflecting change-related beliefs (necessity, legitimacy, support) and psychological reactions (psychological empowerment, affective commitment to change). Our findings suggest that psychological empowerment and affective commitment to change represent largely orthogonal reactions, that psychological empowerment is influenced more by beliefs regarding support, whereas affective commitment to change is shaped more by beliefs concerning necessity and legitimacy.

TheGaia-ESO Survey: New constraints on the Galactic disc velocity dispersion and its chemical dependencies

Understanding the history and the evolution of the Milky Way disc is one of the main goals of modern astrophysics. We study the velocity dispersion behaviour of Galactic disc stars as a function of the [Mg/Fe] ratio, which can be used as a proxy of relative age. This key relation is essential to constrain the formation mechanisms of the disc stellar populations as well as the cooling processes. We used the recommended parameters and chemical abundances of 7800 FGK Milky Way field stars from the second internal data release of the Gaia-ESO Survey. These stars were observed with the GIRAFFE spectrograph, and cover a large spatial volume (6<R<10kpc and |Z|<2kpc). Based on the [Mg/Fe] and [Fe/H] ratios, we separated the thin- from the thick-disc sequence. From analysing the Galactocentric velocity of the stars for the thin disc, we find a weak positive correlation between Vphi and [Fe/H], due to a slowly rotating Fe-poor tail. For the thick disc, a strong correlation with [Fe/H] and [Mg/Fe] is established. We have detected an inversion of the radial velocity dispersion with [Mg/Fe] for thick-disc stars with [Fe/H]<-0.1dex and [Mg/Fe]>+0.2dex. First, the velocity dispersion increases with [Mg/Fe] at all [Fe/H] ratios for the thin-disc stars, and then it decreases for the thick-disc at the highest [Mg/Fe] abundances. Similar trends are observed within the errors for the azimuthal velocity dispersion, while a continuous increase with [Mg/Fe] is observed for the vertical velocity dispersion. The velocity dispersion decrease agrees with previous measurements of the RAVE survey, although it is observed here for a greater metallicity interval and a larger spatial volume. We confirm the existence of [Mg/Fe]-rich thick-disc stars with cool kinematics in the generally turbulent context of the primitive Galactic disc. This is discussed in the framework of the different disc formation scenarios.

Individual Performance in Turbulent Environments: The Role of Organizational Learning Capability and Employee Flexibility

Organizational learning capability (OLC) and employee flexibility help firms navigate the challenges faced by organizations operating in turbulent environments.OLCincludes dimensions such as experimentation, risk taking, openness, dialogue, and participative decision making. Employee flexibility is considered a crucial tool for strategic human resource management in tackling environmental turbulence. Accordingly, we pose the following research question: how, and to what extent, is individual performance enhanced byOLCand employee flexibility in turbulent environments? The major impact that environmental turbulence has on change and flexibility requirements suggests that employee flexibility plays an important role in the impactOLChas on individual performance. However, we found no prior studies that explicitly analyzed this mediating function of employee flexibility. In this study, we tested three hypotheses that linkOLCand individual performance,OLCand employee flexibility, and employee flexibility and individual performance. We applied a structural equation methodology, using partial least squares path modeling, to a sample of 174 academics at a Latin American university (a highly turbulent context). Our results show employee flexibility fully mediates the relation betweenOLCand individual performance given the presence of environmental turbulence. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Post M&amp;A ill-health

Purpose– The current financial crisis in Greece has redefined the way organizations operate resulting in a dramatic increase in mergers and acquisitions (M&amp;As). The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to explore, within the M&amp;A context, the main effects of job-related stressors and perceived organizational support (POS) on merger survivors’ ill-health and second to examine the indirect links between these and commitment.Design/methodology/approach– Data were obtained from 140 employees of two merged financial institutions in Greece post-combination.Findings– The results indicated significant direct relationships between work-related stressors and POS and ill-health. As regards the indirect relationships, only the mediation link between organizational support, ill-health and commitment was supported.Practical implications– Implications, limitations and further research issues are discussed in light of the M&amp;A context.Originality/value– The intention is to extend current stress and M&amp;A literature findings (e.g. Cartwright and Cooper, 1993; Cartwrightet al., 2007), and further investigate the relationship between stressors and ill-health within a turbulent context, since little is known about the behavioral reactions arising as an outcome of M&amp;As in a Greek setting. Thus, the unique contribution of this study is to examine this relationship in a double crisis context: the organizational crisis following the M&amp;A and the financial crisis currently facing Greece, since the area of M&amp;As in Greece has so far received little scholarly attention (Bellou, 2007, 2008).

Development and Validation of a Self-Reported Measure of Job Performance

The current turbulent context in which we live in requires, more and more, that organisations focus on improving the workers’ performance. Individual performance is more than just the execution of specific tasks and it involves an ample variety of organisational activities that have important implications for the understanding and measurement of job performance. Considering the fact that most individual performance measures are developed in order to be applied in particular job-related contexts or cultures, our goal is to develop a job performance measure that might be applicable across jobs and cultures. After an extensive literature review, and based on studies that were developed in different cultural and job-related contexts, two dimensions—task and contextual—and eight sub dimensions of job performance were found: job knowledge, organisational skills, efficiency, persistent effort, cooperation, organisational consciousness, personal characteristics and interpersonal and relational skills. Confirmatory factorial analysis was used in order to test their relevance. The dimensions ‘personal characteristics’ and ‘persistent effort’ were merged. The resulting 29 item scale presents appropriate psychometric properties.

Fit for purpose

News headlines today scream of abuse, violence, intolerance, inequality, and moral bankruptcy. In South Africa, our violent history of apartheid and post-apartheid strife – including the recent xenophobic attacks that have gripped KwaZulu-Natal – highlight issues of physical and emotional anguish, fractured and displaced families, acting out around difference, and economic suffering that not only inform the backdrop to, but are also very palpable within the psychoanalytic space. Emerging from this turbulent context Psychodynamic psychotherapy in South Africa questions the usefulness of psychoanalytically orientated theory and practice in post-apartheid South Africa.

Auditoría del proceso de dirección estratégica. El caso del hotel Villa La Granjita de la ciudad de Santa Clara

Hospitality in the tourism industry is immersed in a turbulent context in which goals and strategies loose meaningfulness very rapidly and therefore make the...

‘The Birth of Black Consciousness on the Screen’?: The African American Historical Experience, Blaxploitation, and the Production and Reception of Sounder (1972)

The black historical film Sounder (1972) was a key feature of the heated debate over race representation in Hollywood cinema in the early 1970s. Indeed, while marking a break from the post-Second World War social problem film, this Depression-set family drama also ran counter to the controversial blaxploitation boom of the period, by emphasising universal themes over those of race. Widely acclaimed in the national press, these qualities also focalised the ongoing conflict over values pertaining to the splintering of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of Black Power in the second half of the 1960s. Making use of a range of primary source materials, including letters sent to the film’s producer and director, this analysis examines Sounder’s turbulent social, cultural and ideological contexts. It considers the aims and influence of key personnel, the wider discussion of black filmic representation, and the film’s complex and contradictory contemporary reception.

Mobilizing crisis management networks — Entrepreneurial behavior in turbulent contexts

Severe socio-economic issues that threaten peace, life or wellbeing of humans in specific regions of the world cannot be solved by any single actor. Wide networks of political, business, governmental, non-profit and humanitarian organizations are to be involved to change existing practices. Despite conflicting interests and competing behavior, involved organizations need to act collectively to initiate the change of commonly accepted practices, i.e. institutions. This is the space in the present study for examining network mobilization as a collective means to change institutions. Our aim is to answer the question: How are networks mobilized in crisis management to initiate institutional change processes in socio-economically turbulent contexts? We provide a framework of network mobilization for institutional change built on the IMP rooted network mobilization research and institutional entrepreneurship discussion. The framework is reflected upon by means of insights from an interview-based case study with representatives of governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in worldwide humanitarian peace-building. We identify, firstly, incentivizing, reticent and adaptational behaviors of network mobilizers to utilize legitimacy and relationship sediments as mobilization enablers. Secondly, these behaviors help network mobilizers to overcome actor visibility and unpredictability as mobilization obstacles in turbulent contexts.

Organisational (un)learning of public research labs in turbulent context

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the underlying mechanisms of organisational learning within public research labs. Results of individual cognitive maps and congregate map, based on a critical case study, showinertia in the organisational learning with negative effects on strategic change and scientific performances of the public research institution. Some main causes of this organisational (un)learning are the effects of friction on the intra-organisational communication among researchers and scientific groups driven by hasty restructuring, high bureaucratisation of public bodies, low coordination and incentives of public servants. Some management implications of learning organisation are discussed.

IT and Agility in the Social Enterprise: A Case Study of St Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s “Cure4Kids” IT-Platform for International Outreach

The agility literature suggests a positive relationship between IT-investments, agility, and performance for firms operating in turbulent contexts. However, agility studies have primarily focused on conceptual concerns, leaving these relationships empirically unexplored. In addition, the literature has focused on for-profit firms operating in commercial markets, thereby leaving other important organizational types unexamined; one such type is the social enterprise (SE). SEs are entrepreneurial organizations with a mission to improve complex social challenges (i.e., healthcare, hunger, education, etc) rather than profit maximization. This void leaves SEs in the dark as to how they can leverage IT to become more agile and improve performance. We draw on the agility perspective to examine how one exemplary SE operating in the context of pediatric global health utilized IT to enhance its agility and improve performance. We identify how the SE’s IT-investment decisions resulted in an IT platform that facilitated increased agility in launching new products aimed at improving survival rates of children. Specifically, we analyze how the SE’s IT platform positively impacted customer, partnering, and operational agility, and demonstrate how this led to dramatic improvements in performance. Finally, we offer evidence to support positive relationships between IT, agility, and performance in social sector contexts.

Shale Gas U-Turns in Bulgaria and Romania: The Turbulent Politics of Energy and Protest

After France, Bulgaria became the second EU country to enact an open-ended ban on hydraulic fracturing in early 2012. This government action was a radical departure from an initially friendly, even enthusiastic stance on unconventional gas development. It resulted in months of unprecedented, broad political protest from environmental groups and local communities. The conflict was interpreted as one involving old questions about Bulgaria’s orientation toward Russia or the West. In neighbouring Romania, Bulgaria’s U-turn on shale gas energized a protest movement which had been relatively weak. In a turbulent election-year context, political leaders scrambled to deal with highly symbolic issues. A new government introduced a moratorium but ended it less than a year later. Another U-turn in public policy happened. Romania parted from Bulgaria’s example and set out to move forward on shale gas, aiding foreign investors. Massive protests against the policy and the investors surged, encircling the drilling operations. In both countries, public mistrust in institutions, environmental regulations and due process of law is a significant factor of political risk for energy companies. Keywords : Bulgaria, Chevron, civil society, communication, energy, energy policy, environment, fracking, hydraulic fracturing, moratorium, Nabucco, natural gas, pipelines, political risk, protest, Gazprom, Romania, Russia, shale gas, South Stream, unconventional gas, USA

The passion according to Berruguete: painting the Auto-da-fé and the establishment of the inquisition in early modern Spain

My paper examines the complex relationship between the visual arts and inquisitorial power in early modern Spain through the analysis of Pedro Berruguete's Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fé (circa 1490). As the first and most emblematic Spanish painting to depict the public ceremony in which the Inquisition announced its sentences, this work has always been interpreted as a propagandistic image aimed at celebrating the Holy Office. The institutional nature of its commission and exhibition – closely connected with the Dominicans – encourages this reading. However, by anchoring my interpretation in the turbulent historical context surrounding the establishment of the Inquisition in Spain, I argue instead that Berruguete produced a multi-layered painting that also echoed the misgivings of many of his contemporaries about the new institution's methods.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger: The evolution of competition and entry‐order advantages in economically turbulent contexts

We examine the evolution of competition and entry‐order advantages in markets under macroeconomic distress. Through formal modeling of early‐mover advantages along industry life cycles subjected to economic shocks and based on simulation findings, we propose that such shocks exogenously induce temporary industry discontinuities that shift the relative value of distinct asset endowments, thereby switching the bases for competitive advantages vis‐à‐vis those found in stable contexts. A vital trade‐off then emerges between a firm's financial flexibility and its pace of investments in isolating mechanisms, such that the former operates as a contingency factor for the latter. As such, flexibility superiority boosts early‐entrants' advantages, while it alternatively gives laggards a much desired strength to out trump first‐mover rivals. Our study informs entry‐order advantage theory and management practice in economically turbulent contexts. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.