Intervening in Value Chains: Lessons from Zambia's Task Force on Acceleration of Cassava Utilisation

Abstract

Smallholder farmers operate in vertical supply chains. Therefore, an understanding of key opportunities and constraints up through the value chain becomes necessary for sustaining smallholder growth. Yet market analysis is of little value unless key private and public sector stakeholders agree to implement necessary reforms. This paper advocates an approach which marries together value chain analysis with a stakeholder task force to ensure that analysis of opportunities and constraints gets translated into actions that will facilitate commercial growth. Using Zambia's cassava task force as an example, the paper describes the value chain task force method and identifies elements critical to its effective implementation.     

Public affairs in China: exploring the role of brand fairness perceptions in the case of Mercedes‐Benz

Mr Sheng Wang demonstrated his perception of Mercedes‐Benz's unfair treatment and insensitivity to Chinese buyers by having his Mercedes sports coupe towed by a water buffalo through his Chinese hometown, Wuhan. But he did not stop there. Next, he ordered workers, specifically hired for this purpose, to pound the car with sledge hammers and sticks until the exterior was completely disfigured. Journalists love the story's inherent drama, and in subsequent days, media reports showed images of the car being towed and ultimately smashed. The event created strong public awareness about both Mr Wang's dissatisfaction about the treatment he received from Mercedes‐Benz and the subsequent Mercedes‐Benz's management reactions triggered by the event. In our paper, we explore this case in more detail, highlighting the crucial role of brand fairness in managing brands in China. Although brand managers implicitly emphasize the importance of fairness in branding strategies, brand management emphasizing fairness is an underdeveloped research concept. Our paper provides an understanding of theories and concepts of brand (un)fairness and brand fairness management illustrated by what we refer to as the Mercedes‐Benz case. We identify three dimensions of Brand Fairness Management: prevention, procedures, and outcomes. This framework will assist brand managers in China in developing successful brand fairness strategies and management programs. We posit that implementing these branding practices will increase the likelihood that consumers perceive the brand in question as fair, leading to an increase in loyalty and positive word‐of‐mouth. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic liveness and forgeries detection of the finger surface on the basis of spectroscopy in the 400-1650 nm region

Differentiation of living fingers, fake fingers and fingers from dead bodies was investigated using spectral analysis. For this purpose, reflection and transmission spectra in the wavelength region from 400 to 1650 nm were recorded from living volunteers and corpses. In an additional small test series (one living volunteer, three cadavers), time-resolved spectral images were prepared using reflectance (derived from pulse oximetry). The dynamic differences in the curves (including the absorption changes caused by the blanching effect and the pulse) provide initial approaches for the realisation of systems for liveness detection. Significant differences that would be useful for the integration into fingerprint recording systems of methods to defend against forgeries are discussed.     

Criminal professional body packers and harmless "swallowers"

Body packing practices used by professional drug smugglers are sometimes imitated. However, both groups can develop the same clinical symptoms induced by body packing. The paper describes four cases of criminal professional body packers and two cases of "swallowers" not regarded as criminals who required medical treatment. The authors discuss the necessity of an abdominal X-ray and show how the increasingly professional methods used by body packers make a reliable diagnosis more difficult.     

Death of an 89-year-old man during autosexual activity

Autoerotic fatalities are accidental deaths occurring as a direct result of autosexual activities, mostly involving men in the 2nd to 8th decade of life. Death most often occurs in the domestic environment due to strangulation or asphyxia. However, fatalities related to autosexual activity in a wider sense may also be caused by an accident or sudden death from an internal cause. We report the case of an aged man who died while engaged in outdoor autosexual activities due to a combination of a pre-existing internal disease and an accident (drowning).     

Scanning for patterns of relationship: analyzing kinship and marriage networks with Puck 2.0

The article presents the software Puck (Program for the use and computation of kinship data), a computer tool for the in-depth analysis of kinship networks. Its core feature consists in identifying, counting and classifying matrimonial circuit structures (resulting from marriages between kin or affines). Such matrimonial censuses make it possible to explore in a rigorous fashion one of the most central questions in kinship studies: the relationship between particular marriage choices and the patterning of the global kinship network that emerges from them. At the same time, Puck constitutes a general tool for the management, treatment and exploratory analysis of genealogical datasets, including non-genealogical relations and random simulations. Puck has been designed to meet two complementary expectations: the identification of the recurrent, cross-cultural organizational properties of kinship networks, and the ability to situate particular actors within social processes involving both genealogical and non-genealogical factors. This article presents the theoretical foundations and main functions of Puck, using concrete examples drawn from a genealogical dataset of upper-class Parisian Jewish banking dynasties present in Paris during the nineteenth century.     

Democracy in crisis? The declining support for national democracy in European countries, 2007–2011

The Great Recession that started in 2007/2008 has been the worst economic downturn since the crisis of the 1930s in Europe. It led to a major sovereign debt crisis, which is arguably the biggest challenge for the European Union (EU) and its common currency. Not since the 1950s have advanced democracies experienced such a dramatic external imposition of austerity and structural reform policies through inter‐ or supranational organisations such as the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or as implicitly requested by international financial markets. Did this massive interference with the room for maneuver of parliaments and governments in many countries erode support for national democracy in the crisis since 2007? Did citizens realise that their national democratic institutions were no longer able to effectively decide on major economic and social policies, on economic and welfare state institutions? And did they react by concluding that this constrained democracy no longer merited further support? These are the questions guiding this article, which compares 26 EU countries in 2007–2011 and re‐analyses 78 national surveys. Aggregate data from these surveys is analysed in a time‐series cross‐section design to examine changes in democratic support at the country level. The hypotheses also are tested at the individual level by estimating a series of cross‐classified multilevel logistic regression models. Support for national democracy – operationalised as satisfaction with the way democracy works and as trust in parliament – declined dramatically during the crisis. This was caused both by international organisations and markets interfering with national democratic procedures and by the deteriorating situation of the national economy as perceived by individual citizens.