Quadruple Helix and firms’ performance: an empirical verification in Europe

The emerging relationships connecting organizations are the condition on which innovation is founded nowadays, so it is pivotal to achieve a vaster comprehension of the phenomenon through the exploitation of new dynamics and the exploration of new trajectories. In line with the Quadruple Helix (QE) approach, it seems reasonable to expect that the different environments in which firms operate would highlight the expectations of the various market governance systems, which firms must comply with in order to gain social legitimacy and improve their capacity for survival. To determine whether the Quadruple Helix model has an effect on the firms’ profitability, the authors employed the classification analysis method (Classification And Regression Trees). The sample is composed by 4215 manufacturing firms located in science parks. In our empirical model, the variable “citizen” classifies businesses with high Return On Investment in the best way. This shows that in science parks “the fourth helix” (citizen) has an important role in classifying the firms with the highest performance. Moreover, the majority of firms that attribute high importance to the collaboration with private financial institutions in order to finance innovations have a high ROI. In addition, firms with high economic performance in the model of the quadruple helix generate product innovation.     

Transnational convergence of public procurement policy: a ‘bottom-up’ analysis of policy networks and the international harmonisation of accessibility standards for information and communication technology

This article seeks to examine how public procurement policies for information and communication technology (ICT), aimed at improving the accessibility of ICT for persons with disabilities, have converged internationally. Convergence, in this instance, refers to the international harmonisation or acceptance of common standards and norms. Distinguishing itself from the predominant authorship in the area, this article seeks to explore convergence from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, by examining the influence of networks of public and private actors on the design of public procurement standards for accessible ICT. Specifically, it will seek to answer how these actors and networks (varying in their level of coordination) have contributed to policy design in a unique area, public procurement of ICT goods and services. The influence of these networks will be discussed through the use of policy documents and semi-structured interviews, to provide empirical support for examining this ‘bottom-up’ analysis and distinguish it from the standard ‘top-down’ model usually employed in this field. This article also focuses on the role of policy actors in the United States and European Union that participated in the harmonisation of public procurement policy and the legal norms and instruments that give these policies their legal effect.     

Modeling the politics of punishment: A conceptual and empirical analysis of ‘law in action’ in criminal sentencing

The empirical sentencing literature has focused intensively on racial equity concerns, but this research added to the literature by analyzing political-contextual sources of punishment. This study developed a functional model of court decision making and used ordinal logit to assess court punishment decisions in 387 counties across seven states. The findings supported established assumptions about individual level punishment determinants, but showed that political environment indicators also predicted sentence severity. Interactions were present as well. In law and order environments Black defendants received enhanced sentences, but in jurisdictions with the largest Black populations, Black defendants faced reduced punishments. With individual and state level effects held constant, the findings from this research reinforced claims that punishment is intensely political.     

The legal form of labour conflicts and their time persistence: an empirical analysis with a large firms’ panel

Using a panel of large firms from Spain, we check the relative time persistence of different types of labour conflicts such as strikes, collective conflicts, lockouts and other conflicts with lost working hours but with no specific legal form. The results show that no legal form labour conflicts do not have long-term persistence (only from quarter to quarter), and the other types of conflicts suffer short and long-term persistence of conflicts at the firm level. Strikes have the higher size of both types of persistence. As short and long term persistence of strikes have almost the same size, these results do not support asymmetric information theories of strike.     

Exploring the influences on Australian agricultural professionals’ genetic engineering beliefs: an empirical analysis

This paper analyses what influences professionals’ beliefs on agricultural genetic engineering. A telephone survey was conducted in 2004 on Australian public agricultural professionals. Using an ordered probit regression, some of the significant key influences on overall beliefs were: age; research relevance; ethnicity; farm background; information and occupational effects; attitudes towards the current sustainability of conventional agriculture; attitudes towards agricultural research issues; and attitudes towards the individual aspects of genetic engineering. Somewhat surprisingly, subjective knowledge of genetic engineering was not a significant factor in influencing overall beliefs, although it did play a positive influence on some individual beliefs (such as the technology’s profitability benefits and that there is no need for more long-term research before further general release of genetically engineered products). However, more research on the links between actual knowledge and acceptance are needed before any definitive conclusions can be drawn.

Social network analysis and small group ‘dark’ networks: an analysis of the London bombers and the problem of ‘fuzzy’ boundaries

Social network analysis (SNA) is believed to be capable of revealing significant insights into crime and terror groups, including identifying important individuals and unique approaches to disruption. However, SNA has a number of theoretical and practical limitations, particularly when applied to ‘dark’ networks. While most analysts certainly acknowledge at least some of these limitations, we need to know more about their potential impact in a crime intelligence context. This article aims to go some way towards that end by placing greater scrutiny on the problem of ‘fuzzy boundaries’ when applied to small group networks. SNA is applied to the groups responsible for the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the 21 July 2005 attempted London bombings. The article concludes that while SNA is a valuable tool for understanding crime and terror groups, the age-old problem of fuzzy boundaries can have a profound impact on the analysis of small dynamic networks.     

Fathers’ patenting behavior and the propensity of offspring to patent: an intergenerational analysis

In this paper we show that the patenting behavior of innovators is correlated with the patenting behavior of their fathers. Our argument for exploring this relationship stems from established theories of entrepreneurial behavior, specifically theories on intergenerational behavior. Our empirical analyses are based on survey data collected from MIT’s Technology Review (TR) winners.     

Therapeutic engagement in medium-secure care: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of service users’ experiences

Service users (SUs) detained in forensic hospitals are usually required to engage in psychological therapies aimed at reducing mental distress and/or for preventing further offending. Poor therapeutic engagement (TE) can lead to adverse clinical outcomes and reoffending, at a cost to the individual, staff, the service provider, and the public. To understand what factors influence TE from a SUs’ perspective, the experiences of 10 male residents of a medium-secure hospital were explored. Using a service-user informed design, interpretative phenomenological analysis of interview data was completed. Four superordinate themes emerged: different worlds; what the individual brings; what the therapy entails; and control. Consideration of how these factors may be of use to professionals working in secure care settings is discussed in relation to existing theory and research.     

The performance of private companies in China before and during the global financial crisis: firms’ characteristics and entrepreneurs’ attributes

Economic Change and Restructuring - This work sheds light on how firm- and entrepreneur-specific attributes covariate with Chinese private firms’ growth rates before and during the global...     

COVID,crisis, and unordinary order: A critical analysis of Australia’s JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme as an exceptional measure

Carl Schmitt’s famous articulation of the relation between sovereignty and the exception emphasises not simply the basis for a suspension of the law in a state of emergency, but the role of the sovereign in deciding upon the existence of the ‘normal situation’, the ‘everyday frame of life’ which the law requires to function. Our pandemic times have included extreme biopolitical measures deployed to manage the health crisis, but also unprecedented political responses to regularise or stabilise the economic order. One example is Australia’s historic JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme. As law, it was given life by an executive power predicated on nationhood and enlivened by crisis. As policy, it was intended to help businesses retain workers through targeted, proportionate support. In reality, it also provided significant protections and even windfalls to corporations and their investors, leading to critiques of the scheme as corporate welfare. However, rather than highlighting deficiencies of the JobKeeper programme, these outcomes underscore its ultimate function. This article analyses the relationship between norm, exception, and order in the context of Australia’s flagship economic-policy response to the pandemic. First, by analysing the mutually constitutive relationship between norm and exception, employing the theories of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. Second, by critically examining the legislative basis for JobKeeper, its political narrative and practical outcomes. Third, by demonstrating that the scheme, though an extraordinary departure from policy, can be understood as fundamentally a different and exceptional method to secure and reproduce our neoliberal corporate order in a state of exception.

     

Police officers’ perceptions of organizational justice and their trust in the public

Research in organizational psychology has consistently demonstrated that employee perceptions of organizational justice have significant effects on employee attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. Similar studies utilizing the organizational justice model in policing have also noted these effects, including the relationship of justice perceptions with officer attitudes toward the public. Recent theoretical developments in policing contend that the association between internal perceptions of justice and external attitudes may be the result of organizational and supervisory practices that ‘trickle-down’ into the police-community relationship. This paper explores this association by assessing the effects of officer perceptions of organizational justice on officer trust in the public. A sample of patrol division police officers were surveyed using measures taken from the organizational justice literature and Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman’s model of organizational trust. Results show a strong relationship between perceptions of organizational justice and trust in the public even when other relevant predictors are controlled.     

‘Legislative frame representation’: towards an empirical account of the deliberative systems approach

The systemic approach to deliberative democracy is an empirically underexplored topic. Since ‘classic’ micro indicators for deliberation are at loggerheads with the idea of distributed deliberation, appropriate assessment techniques for large-scale public deliberation are few and far between. This paper aims at exploring a novel pathway into the empirical translations of the deliberative systems approach, using discourse content and the representation of policy frames in the legislature. I argue that legislative frame representation (LFR) is a crucial indicator for the level of sub-systemic deliberative uptake and policy responsiveness. Next to the necessary theoretical and methodological work, the results of an explorative case study for the immigration discourse in the US and Canada are presented. The results indicate that there are considerable differences in the systems’ capacities to take up discourses from civil society and that LFR can be an important tool to explore deliberative systems empirically.     

Effortful control,negative emotionality,and juvenile recidivism: an empirical test of DeLisi and Vaughn’s temperament-based theory of antisocial behavior

Recently, DeLisi and Vaughn articulated a temperament-based theory of antisocial behavior which they expressed as the first within criminology to use temperament explicitly, and as the exclusive explanatory construct of both antisocial behavior and negative interactions with the criminal justice system. We provide an initial empirical test of the theory’s two main constructs of effortful control (EC) and negative emotionality (NE) with respect to juvenile offending using a sample of 27,712 adjudicated youth. Cox regressions reveal youth with lower levels of EC and those with higher NE re-offend faster, controlling for demographics plus many prominent risk factors. Furthermore, the approximately 5% of youth at the extreme ends of both low EC and high NE evidence higher recidivism rates and faster time to failure. The findings show strong initial support for temperament theory, and we discuss relevancy for future research, prevention and intervention.     

Victims’ perceptions of the police response as a predictor of victim cooperation in the Netherlands: a prospective analysis

The current study prospectively explores whether crime victims’ willingness to cooperate with the police is predicted by victims’ perceptions of police officers’ behaviour with regard to their case through their perceptions of police legitimacy. Structural equation modelling was used to examine the interrelationships between the study variables while controlling for baseline values among a sample of 201 crime victims in the Netherlands. Results indicate that victims’ perceptions of procedural justice and police performance were predictive of both indicators of perceived police legitimacy (i.e. obligation to obey the law and trust in the police). Moreover, victims’ willingness to cooperate with the police was indirectly predicted by victims’ perceptions of procedural justice and police performance, through their perceptions of obligation to obey the law. These findings suggest that police officers may play an important role in stimulating victims’ willingness to cooperate with the police by treating victims fairly and by taking investigative actions to solve the crime.     

Role of drugs and alcohol in impaired drivers and fatally injured drivers in the Strathclyde police region of Scotland, 1995–1998

During the 4-year study period, 1995–1998, the Department of Forensic Medicine and Science, University of Glasgow received a total of 752 biological samples from drivers suspected of driving under the influence of drink and/or drugs in the Strathclyde region of Scotland. The majority of samples were blood and had been primarily obtained from males. Drugs were detected in 68 and 90% of blood and urine samples, respectively. Toxicological analyses revealed that cannabis was the most frequently encountered illegal drug which was detected in 39% of all drug positive blood samples. Benzodiazepines were detected in the majority of drug positive samples with 82% containing at least one member of this group. Polydrug use was prevalent, with the average number of drugs detected per sample increasing from 2.0 in 1995 to 3.1 in 1998. For comparison, the results of toxicological analyses from 151 fatally injured drivers are described. Although the majority of samples tested negative for the presence of drugs and alcohol, drugs were found to be present in 19% and alcohol was detected in 33%. As the majority of drugs had been prescribed or administered post-accident, this study shows that alcohol was the main causative factor conducive to fatal road traffic accidents.     

The Relationship Between Legal and Non-legal Verses in the Qur’an: An Analytical Study of Three Themes of the Qur’an

The Qur’an is considered by Muslim scholars to be one of the two primary sources of Islamic law. The Qur’an deals with many diverse matters, including beliefs, morals, ethics, legal issues and historical narratives. We are not concerned here with establishing the exact proportion of the Qur’an devoted to each of these various categories and in particular to legal rulings. Rather, the pivotal aim of the present investigation is to establish the fact that the whole Qur’an is interrelated, and that the non-legal material in the Qur’an ultimately supports its legal system. This article, therefore, attempts to contribute to the discussion on this issue by asserting that although a large part of the Qur’an does not contain explicit or even implicit legal rulings, it serves, however, to consolidate and establish the Islamic legal system. This assertion is founded on an analysis of the relationship between the legal verses and those with no direct legal rulings stated in them. This article will broadly assess three major themes in the Qur’an which are: God, the Prophet and His message and the present life with the Hereafter. It will underscore their relationship to explicit legal injunctions. These themes are doctrinal in nature but as the analysis will show, they are woven into the framework of the injunctions themselves thereby forging a link between creed and law.     

Are America’s public mass shooters unique? A comparative analysis of offenders in the United States and other countries

Public mass shooters are often assumed to be an exceptionally American problem, but little is known about what proportion of global offenders attack in the United States, or how America’s offenders compare to those in other countries. The present study offers the first quantitative analysis of all known offenders from 1966 to 2012 who attacked anywhere on the globe and killed a minimum of four victims. The results suggest that public mass shooters in the United States are significantly more likely to arm themselves with multiple weapons and attack at school and workplace settings, while offenders from other countries are more likely to strike at military sites. These differences may be partially attributable to America’s national gun culture and its particular set of social strains.