Suchergebnisse

Over the past 10 years IT outsourcing has attracted attention of professionals as a new successful business model that enables developing countries to take a rightful place in the world market. However, the potential of outsourcing of information services in Ukraine is not fully implemented as yet. Research of the Ukrainian IT-outsourcing industry will contribute to understanding the features, opportunities and risks of further development of this industry. The purpose of writing this paper is to identify the trends of development of IT-outsourcing in Ukraine, to determine its place in the global market of information technology outsourcing, to develop recommendations for the expansion of IT-outsourcing in Ukraine. The study was carried out by using empirical methods: measurement, comparison, observation. It was determined that the undisputed leader of the world market by the scope of IT-outsourcing is India. Its success encourages other developing countries to engage efforts to create a national industry of IT-outsourcing. Ukraine can also be called an active player in the global market of information technology outsourcing, which is one of the few sectors of the Ukrainian economy that under conditions of difficult economic and political situation in the country develops effectively. We listed positive trends that take place in the IT-outsourcing despite the critical state of the country. Negative tendencies in this area were identified, in particular low level of trust in Ukraine from the Western companies and we made a conclusion about possible negative impact of this factor on the volume of the market of IT-outsourcing. Solutions to the problems in this industry are proposed and attention is focused on providing strategic priority to the IT-outsourcing. The scientific novelty of the work consists in identifying trends and priorities for the development of IT-outsourcing in Ukraine during political and economic crisis. The practical value of the work lies in defining a guideline for the development of state policy in the area of IT. In addition, the obtained results can be used in further studies in the field of IT-outsourcing in Ukraine and in determining its competitive advantages compared to other countries, which have powerful sectors of the IT-outsourcing. Such research can serve as the basis for decision-making by the Western companies when choosing a country to transfer their IT technologies to. Further scientific results are advisable to focus on determining the prospects of the development of free-lance in Ukraine and on the search for mechanisms of cooperation of Ukrainian and foreign partners in this field.

The relevance of the study is due to the especially sharp of late issue of the competition in world markets, which requires strengthening of innovation component from the economy of any country, including Ukraine. Ukrainian enterprises with innovation activity are able to maintain high growth rate in the long term. The main component in the effectiveness and efficiency of carrying out innovative processes at an enterprise is its innovation potential, including professional staff that is quite difficult to estimate given the rapid changes of the fulfilled tasks. The purpose of writing this article is the analysis of existing approaches to the evaluation of the innovative potential of enterprises and their improvement taking into account the peculiarities of service enterprises, the formulation of the task of innovation management and the main directions of development of innovation potential of an enterprise. We applied system approach, methods of analysis and synthesis and the method of modeling when carrying out research. The task of innovation management of an enterprise was formulated. A methodological approach to the evaluation of the innovation potential of enterprises in the sphere of services is attached. This approach will allow the heads of the enterprises in the sphere of services to monitor creativity and collective intelligence of the employees, to assess an enterprise on innovation and make timely decisions to eliminate the deficiencies. It was stressed that special measurements, quantitative evaluation of the intellectual, professional, educational, and other qualitative characteristics of the potential of employees is quite a difficult task, to perform which the expert methods are used based on interviews, surveys of executives, business owners and prominent managers. The main directions of stimulating the development of the innovation potential of an enterprise were formulated. A conclusion was made that under current conditions, in the absence of perfect methods of evaluation of innovation potential of the services industry, review and comprehensive application of different methods proposed in economic literature will allow obtaining more reliable information for justified management decision–making regarding the management of the innovation potential of an enterprise, introducing relevant changes into the components of the innovation potential to ensure its adequacy to the set innovation goals and increasing a general level of competitiveness in the given industry and in the global market as a whole. The scientific novelty of the research lies in improving the methodological approach to the evaluation of the innovation potential of an enterprise on the basis of the complex of main indicators specific to services and consideration, during the evaluation of personnel, of the innovation potential of an enterprise. The proposed approach allows analyzing the level of innovation potential of enterprises in the different spheres of activity: production, services, state government, commercial and others, where the innovation potential acts not only as a set of available and adequately allocated resources, but also as approved management decision or immaterial object. Since under modern conditions we tackle dynamic market of goods and services and the businesses need to respond quickly to these variable factors of influence, further studies might be directed to determining the capacity and speed of the enterprises to respond to these changes, in particular the ability of the staff to work efficiently and to realize the innovation potential under these conditions.

"Since its introduction to the Yugoslav space, football has always been connected to the main political conflicts. After 1945, the Yugoslav Communists rebuilt sport in their sense, and football as the most important sport was consequently put into service for their state- and nation-building policy. The central symbol was the national team, whose successes represented those of the Yugoslav Socialist model. Nevertheless, in contrast to football's role during the breakup of Yugoslavia, the socialist period itself has been rarely analyzed. Furthermore, football is often used as a tool for analyzing other social phe-nomena (mostly nationalism) and not treated as a socially embedded, but autonomous cultural element with specific internal logics. This article explicitly aims to show the worth of Yugoslav football history as part of a cultural history of sport. Using the examples of the scandal surrounding "the hymn of Luxembourg" 1983, the legendary victory over Bulgaria in December 1983 and the impressive Yugoslav victory at the U20 World Cup in Chile 1987, the article examines how representations of the national team developed when Yugoslavia more and more slipped into a multiple political, economic, social and "identitarian" crisis after Tito's death 1980 and "national" tensions started to grow within the country. On the one hand, the article deals with the representations that the communists and other actors (mainly the new, "nationalist" generation of fans) produced in the 1980s. On the other hand, it takes a look at the success and failure of such representations in Yugoslav society. It is shown that the national team was an attractive symbol that especially in deep crisis could awake and confirm feelings of identification with socialist Yugoslavia. However, it also becomes clear that the potential of football for political representation is always determined by the historical situation and fundamentally limited by its character as a sport with its own logics." (author's abstract)

The article explores certain characteristics of the Yugoslav fan culture by facing major aspects of the politicization of supporter groups, which took place during the 1980s. It starts with a brief description of the development of Yugoslav football and fan cultures with the focus on political and sociohistorical interferences. Using interviews with supporters from this period as well as interviews with experts and other sources, the article describes the youth-cultural manifestations of the fan culture and the active role of the Yugoslav Ultras in the period of homogenization and nationalization of the society – so far the common stereotypes about football fans in Yugoslavia. But there were also supporter groups, defending the idea of a multi-ethnical Yugoslavia until the very end, since a collapse would mean the end of their multi-ethnical group structures. As it is often the case, a generalization about supporters, nationalism and the collapse of Yugoslavia is not appropriate.

In this article I investigate the migration flux of Jews between Rhodes and Buenos Aires in a period marked by the political transition from the Ottoman imperial to Italian (semi)colonial rule. Migration overseas, a phenomenon that sees no clear rupture before and after the occupation of the island by Italian troops in 1912, is treated here as a strategy broadly implemented by individuals and families from the main island of the Dodecanese, putting the experience of the migrants in the foreground, in order to better understand the practice of migration as a negotiation of their position in an interconnected social space between two continents, and avoid to subsume the features of this movement under cultural or religious categories. Using the approach of a translocal history of migration, the article is an attempt to cross-read the developing sociopolitical context of Rhodes through the pattern of movement of humans and capital.

In July 2015 the Special Collections department at the University of Bradford hosted a symposium as part of a project to catalogue and promote the use of the Mitrinović collection. The event showcased the research potential of the archive and library across a range of subject areas, not least the history of the Balkans.

Each organization as a socio-economic system is exposed to the factors of external and internal environment; the organizational culture (OC) of the company is in its turn the product of the interrelation between the external and internal environment of an enterprise, so any impact will determine further formation and development of OC. The factors of both external and internal environment can have a positive or negative trend to a change. The problems of the research into the essence of OC and the innovation potential are tackled in many papers of both domestic and foreign authors, but no relationship was identified between the structure and the factors of OC and innovation potential. Therefore, in our opinion, the issue of identifying the factors influence presents a problem. Its defining will make it possible to forecast a positive or a negative trend in the change of the organizational structure that will determine the capacity to enhance the innovation potential of an enterprise. The purpose of writing this article was to study the influence of factors of external and internal environment of the organization on the components of OC and the innovation potential of an enterprise. To explore the problems studied for the article we structured in detail the concepts and elements that OC contains, and also defined the structure of the innovation potential, its components. Comparison of the structures of OC and innovation potential demonstrated the presence of common and interrelated elements. A deeper analysis was conducted by defining the main factors of OC. The results of the analysis allowed determining the place of OC in the structure of the innovation potential of an enterprise. Thus, the following conclusions can be made. First, the structure of OC and the innovation potential contains a shared item, which is microclimate that implies conditions that can facilitate the development of innovation in the organization. Second, the factors of OC for the most part form the structure of the innovation potential: personality of the founder – management style, system of communication; the size of the organization determines its structure, the presence of various technological premises, the possibility of free movement of the personnel and organization of work. Third, production technology, adopted by the organization, determines the level of its innovation potential. The flexibility of OC allows more intensive using and adapting innovation technologies at an enterprise. The scientific novelty of the research. For the first time we formulated a definition of OC as a model of key elements, genuinely correct and the one that is passed on to the new members of the team as a certain dogma. The practical value of the work lies in summarizing and comparing the basic elements of OC and the innovation potential and identifying common peculiarities that makes it possible to define the role of formation and development of organizational culture in improving the innovation of an enterprise. Further objectives are defined as the analysis of influence factors on the Ukrainian enterprises, identification of problems and development of plans to eliminate them or warn about them.

The predominant "story" about the Slovenian nationalism before the collapse of the SFRY is simple: The Slovenian nationalism (negative perception) or "the Slovenian spring" (positive perception) "ap-peared" in the 1980s, it identified itself as "anti-Yugoslavism" and reached the climax in 1991 with the Slovenian independence. Yet, historical sources - both archival and publicist - expose different story: the relation between Slovenian nationalism and Yugoslavism is much more ambiguous and complicated. Why is the Slovenian Yugoslavism of the 1980s a relevant topic for international com-parative historiography of the second Yugoslavia and its successor states? I would point out two rea-sons. First, I claim that Yugoslavism of any kind could not exist without Slovenianism, especially since the creation of the first Yugoslavia in 1918. The history of Slovenian Yugoslavism (or Sloveni-an nationalism in general) is not just relevant for "the Slovenian national historiography", without "the Slovenian component" we cannot understand Yugoslavia or Yugoslavism in general, which could be understood only in historical context. Although almost all authors recognize the significance of the Slovenian-Serbian conflict for the Yugoslav collapse: they assign surprisingly little attention to Slovenian intellectual circles. They are almost always mentioned, but rarely properly analyzed. Sec-ondly, most of historical analysis is preoccupied with the reasons for the collapse of the Yugoslavia. As H. Grandits and H. Sundhaussen have pointed out, if we research the history of a state that does not exist anymore, we unintentionally "search for" elements of the past, which explain why the state had failed. This is also the reason why Slovenian historians – those who consider the methodology of the academic historiography – are mainly focused on the "processes of independence" or the "process-es of democratization". Slovenian Yugoslavism is not in the spotlight of attention, furthermore, it is mostly seen as an insignificant side-effect of the official Yugoslav ideology of "brotherhood and uni-ty", not as something genuinely Slovenian.

The paper discusses the political process of standardization of the Montenegrin language and its effect on the ethnic differentiation in post-Yugoslav Montenegro. The standardization of the Montenegrin language, which was started by a handful of linguists, eventually became a national project after the independence of Montenegro. This process did not lead to a drastic change of the language; however, it formed and expanded ethnic cleavages in Montenegro.

The article focuses on the question of a possible linkage between unemployment and self-management in socialist Yugoslavia. Departing from secondary sources and offering a critical literature review, the article sketches the development of unemployment in Yugoslavia from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, outlines different points of discussion and explores concrete gaps in the existing interpretations. By proposing a differentiated view of self-management, the a uthors conclude that from an economic perspective the relationship between self-management and unemployment was at best an indirect one. The broader system of self-management can hardly be interpreted as an obstacle to political participation or social integration of unemployed persons. In contrast to previous interpretations of Yugoslavia's unemployment which regard it as a paradox, the authors suggest that the paradox was not the existence of unemployment in a socialist state, but the way in which the society - especially when organized on the basis of socialist self-management - reacted to it. In fact, the Yugoslav response to the problem of unemployment proved to be not really different from the way this was handled by other (capitalist) states in this period.

The Marinković family, which originated from the island of Brač, immigrated to the eastern Bolivian province of Santa Cruz in the mid-1950s. Thanks to a successful agricultural business, among other things, the family has become one of the richest and most influential families in Bolivia. Some analysts link Branko Marinković's origins with his oppositional activities in Bolivia. This is due to the fact that Marinković compares the contemporary "Twenty-first century socialism" policies of Bolivian president Evo Morales with the communist policies of Tito in Yugoslavia. With that in mind, the aim of this paper is to analyze to what extent the immigrant origin of Marinković's family has influenced his political activities. This analysis can be carried out by relating his political activities to the Ustaša immigrants who came to Latin America after the Second World War and also within the context of the narrative of Bolivian authorities who believed Marinković was trying to Balkanize Bolivia.

Many test constructions show a lack of awareness concerning the comprehensibility of items, specifically in personality tests. However, this lack of awareness can have implications for psychometric quality. Frequently, it is simply assumed that respondents' understanding of a test item matches the meaning implied by the test developer. It is, however, rarely ever tested whether all respondents of the targeted population actually understand the test items correctly and in a similar way. As pointed out in the last editorial (Ziegler, 2014), item content should be precisely tuned to the needs of every potential respondent in a population targeted by a newly developed test. More specifically, person variables such as age, gender, and education (Rammstedt & Kemper, 2011) have to be taken into account when constructing test items in order to assure that each potential respondent fully understands the meaning and may respond accordingly. If these person variables are neglected in the process of test construction, the psychometric quality of a test may be substantially affected by fuzzy concepts. The goal of this editorial is to raise awareness for the detrimental effects fuzzy concepts can have in test development and possible remedies. (author's abstract)

In different fields of the behavioral sciences, a growing demand for brief measures of psychological constructs can be observed. The current research presents new evidence on the reliability and validity of a recently developed ultra-short measure of the optimism construct sensu Scheier and Carver (1985), the German version of the Scale Optimism-Pessimism-2 (SOP2) as well as first evidence on Spanish and Italian adaptations. Reliability estimates indicate good reliability. Correlations with criteria from the nomological net of the construct are as expected. Equivalence of SOP2 factors across language versions is supported. Due to its highly efficient, yet accurate and valid measurement of the construct, the SOP2 is strongly recommended for assessment settings with severe monetary/time constraints, for example, large-scale surveys. Due to the factor equivalence, the SOP2 is also a valuable measure for cross-cultural studies. (author's abstract)