The International Handbook of Social Enterprise Law

This open-access book brings together international experts who shed new light on the status of social enterprises, benefit corporations and other purpose-driven companies. The respective chapters take a multidisciplinary approach (combining law, philosophy, history, sociology and economics) and provide valuable insights on fostering social entrepreneurship and advancing the common good. In recent years, we have witnessed a significant shift of how business activities are conducted, mainly through the rise of social enterprises. In an effort to target social problems at their roots, social entrepreneurs create organizations that bring transformative social changes by considering, among others, ethical, social, and environmental factors. A variety of social enterprise models are emerging internationally and are proving their vitality and importance. But what does the term “social enterprise” mean? What are its roots? And how does it work in practice within the legal framework of any country? This handbook attempts to answer these questions from a theoretical, historical, and comparative perspective, bringing together 44 contributions written by 71 expert researchers and practitioners in this field. The first part provides an overview of the social enterprise movement, its evolution, and the different forms entities can take to meet global challenges, overcoming the limits of what governments and states can do. The second part focuses on the emergence of benefit corporations and the growing importance of sustainability and societal values, while also analyzing their different legal forms and adaptation to their regulatory environment. In turn, the last part presents the status quo of purpose-driven companies in 36 developed and emerging economies worldwide. This handbook offers food for thought and guidance for everyone interested in this field. It will benefit practitioners and decision-makers involved in social and community organizations, as well as in international development and, more generally speaking, social sciences and economics

The International Handbook of Social Enterprise Law

This open-access book brings together international experts who shed new light on the status of social enterprises, benefit corporations and other purpose-driven companies. The respective chapters take a multidisciplinary approach (combining law, philosophy, history, sociology and economics) and provide valuable insights on fostering social entrepreneurship and advancing the common good. In recent years, we have witnessed a significant shift of how business activities are conducted, mainly through the rise of social enterprises. In an effort to target social problems at their roots, social entrepreneurs create organizations that bring transformative social changes by considering, among others, ethical, social, and environmental factors. A variety of social enterprise models are emerging internationally and are proving their vitality and importance. But what does the term “social enterprise” mean? What are its roots? And how does it work in practice within the legal framework of any country? This handbook attempts to answer these questions from a theoretical, historical, and comparative perspective, bringing together 44 contributions written by 71 expert researchers and practitioners in this field. The first part provides an overview of the social enterprise movement, its evolution, and the different forms entities can take to meet global challenges, overcoming the limits of what governments and states can do. The second part focuses on the emergence of benefit corporations and the growing importance of sustainability and societal values, while also analyzing their different legal forms and adaptation to their regulatory environment. In turn, the last part presents the status quo of purpose-driven companies in 36 developed and emerging economies worldwide. This handbook offers food for thought and guidance for everyone interested in this field. It will benefit practitioners and decision-makers involved in social and community organizations, as well as in international development and, more generally speaking, social sciences and economics

Smart Industry - Better Management

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Smart industry requires better management. As industrial and production systems are future-proofed, becoming smart and interconnected through use of new manufacturing and product technologies, work is advancing on improving product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency, and cost, optimally using supply chains. Presenting innovative, evidence-based, and cutting-edge case studies, with new conceptualizations and viewpoints on management, Smart Industry, Better Management explores concepts in product systems, use of cyber physical systems, digitization, interconnectivity, and new manufacturing and product technologies. Contributions to this volume highlight the high degree of flexibility in people management, production, including product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency and cost in being able to finely adjust to customer needs and make full use of supply chains for value creation. Smart Industry, Better Management illustrates how industry can enabled by a more network-centric approach, making use of the value of information and the latest available proven manufacturing techniques

A COMPARISON BETWEEN MOTIVATIONS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS IN RELIGIOUS TOURISTS AND CRUISE SHIP TOURISTS

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the motivations and the personality traits that characterize tourists who choose religious travels versus cruises. Participating in the research were 683 Italian tourists (345 males and 338 females, age range 18–63 years); 483 who went to a pilgrimage travel and 200 who chose a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Both groups of tourists completed the Travel Motivation Scale and the Big Five Questionnaire. Results show that different motivations and personality traits characterize the different types of tourists and, further, that motivations for traveling are predicted by specific —some similar, other divergent— personality trait

Evaluation of the ingestive behaviour of the dairy cow under two systems of rotation with slope

The ingestive behaviour of grazing animals is modulated by the vegetation characteristics, topography and the type of stocking method. This research was carried out in 2019, at the Rumipamba CADER-UCE. It aimed to evaluate the impact of two contrasting stocking methods of dairy cows grazing a pasture with an average of slope >8.5%. Four dairy cows were set to graze a 0.4 ha paddock for 5 days for continuous stocking methods, while for the electric fence methods the dairy cows were restricted to 0.2 ha and the fence was moved uphill every 3 hours, repeating this process four times a day. Cow were equipped with activity sensors for 12 h per day. The whole procedure was repeated 2 times after realizing an equalization cuts and both paddocks, a rest time of 30 days and a random reassignment of paddocks to one of the treatments. The cows showed a difference in terms of the percentage of grazing P=0.0072, being higher with the electric fence (55% of the measurement time). From rising-plate-meter estimates of available biomass along the grazing periods, we calculated despite similar forage allowances (electric fence = 48.06 kg DM/cow/d and continuous = 48.21 DM/cow/d) a higher forage intake was obtained in the electric fence treatment (17.5 kg DM/cow/d) compared the continuous stocking (15.7 kg DM/cow/d) (P=0.006). In terms of milk production animals grazing under the differences electrical fence stocking method tended (P=0.0985) to produce more milk (17.39 kg/d) than those grazing in the continuous system (15.16 kg/d) due to the influence of the slope (P=0.05), while for milk quality the protein content was higher for the electric fence (33.7 g/l) than the continuous method (30.5 g/l) (P=0.039). None of the other milk properties differed between methods (P>0.05)

There goes the neighbourhood: Gentrification and marginality in modern life.

Gentrification is the term applied to the process whereby middle-class people move into working class areas in the inner city, either residential areas, or old warehouses or sweatshops. This thesis seeks on the one hand to explain gentrification as the consequence of the development of domestic technologies, and on the other to understand it as a metaphor rooted in the characteristic experience of marginality in modern life. Debate over the causes of gentrification have polarized around two themes: that gentrification is the consequence of the rise of a new middle class heralding the onset of a post-industrial or post-modern society; or that gentrification is just another example of the contradictions underpinning capitalist development (in this case, the contradiction between the value of a building and the value of the land on which it sits - the rent gap hypothesis). This thesis argues that the falling cost of domestic technologies such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners has made it possible to bring the value of housing services which can be supplied by a Victorian house into line with the value of the housing services provided by the most modern house. Gentrification is then explained as a consequence of the middle classes taking advantage of the opportunity offered by these developments. In contrast to the explanations currently dominating the gentrification debate, this thesis therefore argues that gentrifiers gentrify because they can, and not because they have to. Consequently, the explanation of gentrification has nothing to do with questions of class, nor indeed of gender. Gentrification is a transient, not a cyclical phenomenon, and would have occurred whether the process was carried out entirely by women or entirely by men. The currently dominant explanations of gentrification argue that gentrifiers gentrify because they have to as they are subject to forces beyond their control: the rise of post- industrial society; or the reappearance of accumulation crises in capitalist urban development. These explanations are then left with the problem, not of explaining the existence of gentrification in those inner-city areas where it does occur, but in explaining its absence from all those other inner-city areas in which it does not occur, since they are couched in such general terms that they could apply to every member of the middle classes or to every inner city area, not just those associated with gentrification. These explanations of gentrification therefore over-estimate its quantitative significance, also. The fact that this over-estimation occurs is however of great interest. Using arguments derived from Robert Park and Raymond Williams, this thesis suggests that the reason for this is that gentrification touches on many characteristic insecurities of modern life. Gentrification therefore has resonances far wider than its quantitative significance would suggest. 'Gentrification' is a metaphorical expression, derived from 'gentry', the rural landowning classes. Gentrification can best be understood, therefore, in terms of attempts to realize an Arcadian (and class) vision of the 'country': a stable retreat in the very heart of the everchanging and often threatening 'city'. Insofar as gentrification represents a particular strategy for dealing with a universally experienced condition, the study of gentrification illuminates the way we live now

SIS 2017. Statistics and Data Science: new challenges, new generations

The 2017 SIS Conference aims to highlight the crucial role of the Statistics in Data Science. In this new domain of ‘meaning’ extracted from the data, the increasing amount of produced and available data in databases, nowadays, has brought new challenges. That involves different fields of statistics, machine learning, information and computer science, optimization, pattern recognition. These afford together a considerable contribute in the analysis of ‘Big data’, open data, relational and complex data, structured and no-structured. The interest is to collect the contributes which provide from the different domains of Statistics, in the high dimensional data quality validation, sampling extraction, dimensional reduction, pattern selection, data modelling, testing hypotheses and confirming conclusions drawn from the data

Communicating Science to High School Pupils by Video Production: Lessons Learned

The Collaborative Research Centre 754 (SFB 754) at GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany is an interdisciplinary research programme, which investigates the threats posed by ocean de-oxygenation and how this is coupled with climate change and the nutrient balance in the tropical oceans. The outreach component of SFB 754 has the task of producing videos with and for school pupils, in which different aspects of the science of the SFB are explained and introduced in a short and entertaining fashion. The goal is to attract pupils to sciences, both by the active involvement in the video production and by the consumption of the videos made by other pupils. So far more than 30 video clips were published on a dedicated website for viewing and download. The process of video production is enjoyable for all parties involved, but it is also time consuming and entails considerably more work for students and teachers, than normal lessons in class. As a result, the project now concentrates on dedicated summer schools and after-school activities as a platform for video productio