Computational entrepreneurship: from economic complexities to interdisciplinary research

The development of technology is unbelievably rapid. From limited local networks to high speed Internet, from crude computing machines to powerful semi-conductors, the world had changed drastically compared to just a few decades ago. In the constantly renewing process of adapting to such an unnaturally high-entropy setting, innovations as well as entirely new concepts, were often born. In the business world, one such phenomenon was the creation of a new type of entrepreneurship. This paper proposes a new academic discipline of computational entrepreneurship, which centers on: (i) an exponentially growing (and less expensive) computing power, to the extent that almost everybody in a modern society can own and use that; (ii) omnipresent high-speed Internet connectivity, wired or wireless, representing our modern day’s economic connectomics; (iii) growing concern of exploiting “serendipity” for a strategic commercial advantage; and (iv) growing capabilities of lay people in performing calculations for their informed decisions in taking fast-moving entrepreneurial opportunities. Computational entrepreneurship has slowly become a new mode of operation for business ventures and will likely bring the academic discipline of entrepreneurship back to mainstream economics

Norms and Law: Putting the Horse Before the Cart

Law and society scholars have long been fascinated with the interplay of formal legal and informal extralegal procedures. Unfortunately, the fascination has been accompanied by imprecision, and scholars have conceptually conflated two very different mechanisms that extralegally resolve disputes. One set of mechanisms might be described as the shadow of the law, made famous by seminal works by Professors Stewart Macaulay and Marc Galanter, in which social coercion and custom have force because formal legal rights are credible and reasonably defined. The other set of mechanisms, recently explored by economic historians and legal institutionalists, might be described as order without law, borrowing from Professor Robert Ellickson\u27s famous work.1 In this second mechanism, extralegal mechanisms—whether organized shunning, violence, or social disdain—replace legal coercion to bring social order and are an alternative to, not an extension of, formal legal sanctions. One victim of conflating these mechanisms has been our understanding of industry-wide systems of private law and private adjudication, or private legal systems. Recent examinations of private legal systems have chiefly understood those systems as efforts to economize on litigation and dispute-resolution costs, but private legal systems are better understood as mechanisms that economize on enforcement costs. This is not a small mischaracterization. Instead, it reveals a deep misunderstanding of when and why private enforcement systems arise in a modern economy. This Essay provides a taxonomy for the various mechanisms of private ordering. These assorted mechanisms, despite their important differences, have been conflated in large part because there has been a poor understanding of the particular institutional efficiencies and costs of the alternative systems. Specifically, enforcement costs have often been inadequately distinguished from procedural or disputeresolution costs, and this imprecision has produced theories that inaccurately predict when private ordering will thrive and when the costs of private ordering overwhelm corresponding efficiencies. The implications for institutional theory are significant, as confusion in the literature has led to overappreciation of private ordering, underappreciation of social institutions, and Panglossian attitudes toward both lawlessness and legal development

“Peri Nomou” System: Automated Codification and Interrelation of Legal Elements Based on Text Mining

One of the most promising developments comes with the use of innovative technologies and thus with the availability of novel services. The combination of text mining with legal elements may contribute to the development of many innovative legal information systems. Moreover, in the case of public admin-istrations and governments, the distribution, availability, and access towards legal information are es-sential and urgent. On the other hand, legal data and law texts are a potential open Government data category in order for innovation to be achieved, regarding the development of new, better, and more cost-effective services for citizens. Those data need to be available 24/7 basis and compliant towards a standard. Yet, there exist some severe issues at the moment regarding this access. This, in turn, makes the use of automated crawling and analysis more than difficult. This paper describes the “Peri Nomou” (about law) system: an innovative legal information system for Greek laws utilising text mining tech-niques to indexing legal documents, identifying correlations and dividing legal documents into their articles. The first version of the system has been evaluated by legal experts and the second version is developed based on the previous evaluation and presented in this paper. The results from the evaluation indicate the significance of the “Peri Nomou” system for the legal experts and allow us to promote the Peri Nomou system to other user groups, such as business, public administration

Sex in the City: The Descent from Human to Animal in Two Vietnamese Classics of Urban Reportage

This article examines the relationship between urban space, normative sexuality and animal metaphors in two Vietnamese classics of modern reportage, namely Tam Lang’s “I Pulled a Rickshaw” (1932) and Vu Trong Phung’s “Household Servants” (1936). Both reportages are set in colonial Hanoi, and both provide a glimpse of the explosive growth of urban space and its perceived effects on the city’s inhabitants. While scholars examining early twentieth-century Vietnamese urban reportages have tended to focus on their historical and ethnographic value, the article pays special attention to a key dimension that defines the genre: their figurative language. The article demonstrates that the distinction between human and animal is intertwined with each author’s critique of colonial modernity. For both Lang and Phung, urban space represents a postlapsarian descent of the human to the animal level. Far from embodying liberation, urban space metaphorically figures as a disruption of certain ideals of human sociality founded on a moral regime, whereby the category of the “human” is distinguished from the animal by norms of self-regulation and self-moderation. Insofar as it is founded on such a regime, normative sexuality and urban space embody antinomies of each other

The role of government in the development of ethnic entrepreneurs : The qualitative study on Vietnamese ethnic entrepreneur in Finland

Entrepreneurship has consequently become the most available means of economic and social survival for foreigners who are facing diverse challenges. However, the recognition of ethnic entrepreneurship is still limited in Finland in comparison with other countries. Besides, while a large number of studies related to the development of ethnic entrepreneurship have been published, only a limited number of articles focus on the institutional environment and its effect on the ethnic entrepreneurship. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the role of Finnish governmental policies and programs in the development of ethnic entrepreneurs during initial stages of the entrepreneurial process. The qualitative study on Vietnamese ethnic entrepreneurs was conducted in Turku region, Finland. In order to answer the research questions, the literatures about the ethnic entrepreneurship, the institutional environment, and initial stages of the entrepreneurial process have been reviewed carefully. All the factors have been combined and illustrated in the synthesis, which is used as the guideline for the empirical study. The research approach chapter outlines the methodology and data collection process. The qualitative method with interviewing is chosen as the main research methodology. Five Vietnamese ethnic entrepreneurs with different backgrounds and business experience were selected for the data collection process. Next, the modified synthesis was presented in order to reflect the empirical studies about how the Finnish governmental policies and programs actually affected the growth of Vietnamese ethnic entrepreneurs during their early stages of business. In summary, the theoretical conclusion, including the managerial implications and limitations as well as the suggestions for further researches, was presented. This dissertation provides a fundamental knowledge about the role of governmental policies and programs in the development of ethnic entrepreneurship and practical knowledge about the experience of Vietnamese immigrants in Turku region. It is suggested that more empirical studies about the role of the government in other regions should be conducted

Discursive Constitutionalism

“Constitutionalism” has been contentiously debated at national and international levels. This Article develops the concept of discursive constitutionalism, defined as the construction of constitutionalism through public discourse. It theorizes about four elements (ideas, actors, actions, and spaces) and the constructive logic of discursive constitutionalism. Public constitutionalist discourse can be shaped by the existing relations of political power. At the same time, it can constrain the political monopoly of constitutional thinking, shape the design of institutions to limit political power, and prevent the arbitrary use of political power in practice. This study provides an explanatory account of three models of discursive constitutionalism in East Asia. The protectionist model in Japan refers to the discursive defense of national constitutional commitments to international peace and renouncing war. The reformist model in China denotes the discursive promotion of institutional reforms in line with normative values of constitutionalism. The diffusionist model in Vietnam features the discursive spread of constitutionalist ideas from external international and comparative sources into internal intellectual communities. Discursive constitutionalism can be a useful conceptual tool to understand the quest for constitutionalism through public discourse