Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn 2022, Finland applied for NATO membership as a reaction to Russia's attack on Ukraine with full parliamentary support. The Marin government pushed through reforms, which in the autumn got contested. Frictions emerged within the government in anticipation of the general election in 2023. In January 2022, the first regional elections were held, with victory to the opposition party National Coalition. One of the traditional ruling parties, Centre, demonstrated its appeal, despite falling support nationwide. PM Sanna Marin's Social Democrats became second. Finland received much attention abroad due to the war and NATO membership application, but PM Marin's party videos also made headlines worldwide. In Finnish politics and society, attention was shifted overnight from the COVID‐19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine and what the effects of the drastically changing relations to the neighbouring Russia would be.

AbstractThis report on Hungarian politics in 2022 aims at explaining how the incumbent Fidesz‐KDNP (Fidesz‐Keresztény Demokrata Néppárt) government managed to uphold its dominance in Hungarian politics. Through nominating and electing the new president of Hungary, winning the parliamentary elections along with presenting a referendum reflecting the Fidesz political agenda, the government successfully maintained its public support in 2022 despite external challenges such as the war on Ukraine or the ongoing fraud feud with the European Union (EU) and internal conflicts resulting from economic pressures.

AbstractThe Russian‐Ukrainian war, which started in February 2022, changed Estonian domestic politics considerably. The Reform Party, which had failed to manage domestic crises at the end of 2021, was able to prove itself in foreign politics, and its support skyrocketed. Its coalition partner at the start of the war, the Centre Party, however, lost support, which eventually led to the break‐up of the government coalition in the middle of the year. A new government was formed by the Reform Party, Fatherland and the Social Democratic Party, which was limited in its ambitions and cautious of its political choices as elections were approaching in March 2023.

AbstractIn 2022, voters in Slovenia were invited several times to the polling stations, starting with the National Assembly elections in spring, followed by presidential and local elections. In addition, three nationwide referenda were held in November. The National Assembly elections saw the victory of a newly established party and the appointment of yet another political newcomer to the position of Prime Minister. Only five parties managed to pass the parliamentary threshold, the smallest number since the country's democratic transition. The centre‐left coalition government was formed by three parties. Many reforms were promised to be prepared by the new government, including a revitalisation of democracy after several years of democratic backsliding, along with a promise that those in public office will behave differently. The new government formed in June enjoyed high public support in 2022, and by the end of the year, 45 per cent of voters assessed its work as (very) positive.

AbstractAfter the successful adoption of a COVID‐19 elimination strategy in 2020, in 2021 the New Zealand government introduced strategies to limit and mitigate the spread of the virus, as the elimination strategy looked increasingly unsustainable. It rolled out vaccines, imposed vaccine mandates and grappled with the complexities of the largely closed border. Despite the continuing pandemic demands, the Labour government, now with an outright majority after the General Election in late 2020, attempted to make progress on elements of its reform agenda in health, housing, water, transport and some social areas. Opposition to these reforms, which had a centralizing thrust and expanded in limited ways the scope of Māori participation in governance and decision‐making, was swift. By the end of the year, emerging debates about vaccine mandates and public weariness with lockdowns contributed to growing discontent with the government's COVID‐19 policies.

PurposeDistribution arrangements are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic in business as well as in consumer markets. The purpose of the present paper is to explore and discuss the theoretical frameworks available to interpret these distribution arrangements, to uncover how they are interrelated and to suggest extensions.Design/methodology/approachA survey of extant research is undertaken, starting with the literature on supply chain management (SCM). It turns out that prior to the launch of the SCM concept in the early 1980s, two separate research streams coexisted which both pertain to aspects of distribution. These two research streams are described and traced back to a common root.FindingsIt is suggested that SCM may be regarded as an attempt to unite the two separate research streams known as business logistics and marketing channels, respectively. These two approaches have focused on different aspects of distribution arrangements, but both are preoccupied with managerial challenges faced by individual companies. The managerial focus is also very clear in SCM. The paper traces the common roots of all of these approaches to the marketing discipline in the first half of the twentieth century and suggests that this constitutes a basis for the future development.Originality/valueThe contribution of the paper is twofold: first the overview of the different streams of literature dealing with distribution arrangements and how they are interrelated has not been spelled out so clearly before. Second, the discussions undertaken suggest that future research would benefit from going "back to the future" in the sense that one can learn from frameworks developed for the purpose of understanding the supply system as a whole, the role of the individual participants in that system, and the underlying economics of such a system.

This note develops a generalized ‐variate hazard function for censored data in survival analysis. It introduces a generalized recursive formula, extending the bivariate and trivariate cases introduced by Clayton and Cuzick (1985, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (General), 148(2):82–108) and Kittani (1995, Journal of Mathematical Sciences, 67–74), respectively. The newly developed function is explicitly specified by association parameters and marginal hazard functions.

This report on Data, Knowledge Organisation, and Epistemic Impact covers the findings of WP 4 of the K-PLEX project. It focuses on data collection, production, and analysis in a broad range of scientific disciplines, on epistemologies and methodologies, and research organisation. The cross-disciplinary research topic "emotions" has been chosen to ensure comparability across disciplines and to investigate different epistemic cultures. Findings are based on a survey with 123 responses and 15 expert interviews. Results show the heterogeneity of research approaches and epistemic dissonances resulting from a broad variety of epistemic cultures in emotion research. Datafication – the rendering of real-world phenomena into data – inevitably leads to a reduction of complexity of the research object "emotions". This simplification results from the limitations imposed by the epistemologies and the biases inherent to methodological decisions. The dissection into various disciplines and epistemic cultures and the challenges of interdisciplinarity further the marginalisation of complexity. Interdisciplinarity in emotion research was deemed as both beneficial and demanding. While interdisciplinary research projects were seen to be fruitful on a theoretical and conceptual level, the development of research methodologies that enable data structures which can be aggregated into larger data sets proved to be challenging. Data structures are designed according to methodological requirements and not to ensure reusability. Structural factors like the difficulties of research organisation in large-scale interdisciplinary research units, or the lack of high-ranked journals publishing interdisciplinary results further impede such research endeavours. Data cannot be seen independently from the context in which they were constructed and collected. The narrower context of the research setting and of the researcher as well as the wider contexts of the historical, political, social, cultural and linguistic circumstances of data collection ...

This article will review the major components of a Human Resource Information System (HRIS), including systems that are computerized and those that are not. These basic components provide a foundation for the reader to understand and explore how computerized and non-computerized information can assist human resources (HR) professionals achieve certain human resource objectives. There are many different types of computer software available to help in developing a comprehensive human resource information system. There is no doubt that personal computers can support real human resource decisions, but the information must be available in a form that can be utilized effectively in the decision making process.

Following unprecedented earthquakes in 1999, highly centralized Turkey initiated reforms that aimed to improve disaster management collaboration and to empower local authorities. In 2011, two earthquakes hit the country anew affecting the city of Van and town of Erciş in Turkey's southeast. In attempts to reduce disaster risk, global disaster risk reduction frameworks and disaster scholars and practitioners advocate collaborative and decentralized disaster management strategies. This thesis investigates how such strategies are received in a centralized and hierarchical national political-administrative system that largely is the anti-thesis of the prescribed solutions. More specifically, this research investigates the barriers and prerequisites for disaster management collaboration between both public and civil society actors in Turkey (during preparedness, response, and recovery) as well as how Turkey's political-administrative system affects disaster management collaboration and its outcomes. The challenges to decentralization of disaster management are also investigated. Based on forty-four interviews with actors ranging from national to village level and NGOs, the findings suggest that the political-administrative system can alter the relative importance, validity, and applicability of previously established enabling or constraining conditions for collaboration. This may in turn challenge previous theoretical assumptions regarding collaboration. By adopting a mode of collaboration that fit the wider political-administrative system, collaborative disaster management progress was achieved in Turkey's national level activities. Although there were exceptions, collaboration spanning sectors and/or administrative levels were generally less forthcoming, partly due to the disjoint character of the political-administrative system. Political divergence between local and central actors made central-local collaboration difficult but these barriers were partly trumped by other prerequisites enabling collaboration like interdependence and pre-existing relations. The findings suggest that the specific attributes of disasters may both help and hinder disaster management collaboration. Such collaboration generally improved disaster response. The findings also indicate that the decentralization attempts may have been premature as the conditions for ensuring a functional decentralization of disaster management are presently lacking. Decentralization attempts are commonly suggested to increase local capacity and local participation but the findings of this dissertation suggest that in Turkey, these commodities may currently have better chances of being increased by refraining from decentralization.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to assess the substantiveness of stakeholder engagement by examining voluntary disclosures tied to the engagement process. The objective is to draw a portrait of stakeholder engagement practices and determine whether they genuinely contribute to informing stakeholders or whether they are simply intended to manage stakeholders' impressions.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors performed an exploratory content analysis on 113 sustainability reports published in 2018 in the Global Reporting Initiative database. The authors investigated disclosures tied to consulted stakeholders, communication modes and material issues resulting from the engagement process. The authors then assessed the substantiveness of these disclosures to determine the extent of the impression management tactics deployed in the stakeholder engagement disclosures made by Canadian companies.


Findings
Data analysis showed that more than a third of Canadian firms tend to make generic disclosures on their stakeholders' engagement. As well, almost half the engagement modes disclosed are unidirectional and fewer than 33% of Canadian companies disclose on relevant sustainability issues. Furthermore, only 26% of the sample seek assurance on the information disclosed. Overall, the authors note an important trend in impression management used in sustainability reporting and underscore a potentially significant sectoral effect in the tactics used.


Originality/value
These data provide new insight into stakeholder engagement processes and highlight the strategies used by Canadian companies to manage their stakeholders' impressions rather than their expectations. The study also contributes to a better understanding of the underexplored stakeholder engagement process and provides regulatory organisations with deepened insights to better frame stakeholder engagement disclosures.