Girişimci Yönlülük, Stratejik Yönlülük ve Performans İlişkisi: İstanbul İli Tekstil İşletmelerinde Bir Uygulama Entrepreneurial Orientation, Strategic Orientation And Performance Relationship: A Case Study For Textile Firms In Istanbul

Bu çalışma İstanbul ilinde faaliyet gösteren tekstil sektör işletmelerinin girişimci yönlülük, stratejik yönlülük ve performans ilişkisini belirlemeye yönelik görgül bir araştırmayı amaçlar. Girişimci yönlülük, stratejik yönlülük ve performans olarak üç boyutlu tasarlanan çalışmada anket yöntemi kullanılmıştır. Anket çalışması 400 işletmeyle yüz yüze görüşme yöntemi ile gerçekleştirilmiş ve elde edilen veriler değerlendirilmeye alınmıştır. Verilerin analizinde, Lisrel 8.7 istatistiki program yardımıyla doğrulayıcı faktör analizi ve yapısal eşitlik model analizi ile test edilmiştir. Analizde araştırmada oluşturulan, her üç hipotez kabul edilmiş olup hipotezler sonucunda oluşturulan araştırma modeli tam olarak doğrulanmıştır. This study aims an empirical research to determine entrepreneurial orientation, strategic orientation and performance relationship for textile firms that operate in Istanbul. Questionnaire method was used in the study that was organized in three layers as entrepreneurial orientation, strategic orientation and performance. The created questionnaire was applied to 400 firms with face-to-face interview technic and the obtained data was analyzed. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model analysis were conducted in data analysis by using Lisrel 8.7 statistics package program. All of the three hypotheses were accepted and the research model that was created depending on the hypotheses was entirely verified

Between a rock and a hard place: corporate elites in the context of religion and secularism in Turkey

Drawing on discourse analyses of 36 in-depth interviews with elite business people from Turkey, the study identifies the networking patterns of new and established business elites in the context of economic liberalization and socioreligious transformation of the country. Through a comparative analysis of the so-called secular and religious elite networks, we demonstrate the role of institutional actors such as the government, and identity networks, based on religion and place of birth in shaping the form and content of social networks among business elites in Turkey. In order to achieve this, we operationalize Bourdieu's notion of theory of practice and Granovetter's theory of social networks, illustrating the utility of combining these approaches in explicating the form and content of social networks in their situated contexts, in which power and divergent interests are negotiated.Galatasaray University Research Fund [grant number 12.102.005]

Sürdürülebilir Rekabetçi Üstünlük Sağlamada Pazarlama Yetenekleri ve Performans Arasındaki İlişki: Ankara İli İmalat İşletmelerinde Bir Uygulama* The Relationship Between Marketing Capabilities and Performance in Sustainable Competitive Advantage: An Application in Manufacturing Enterprises in Ankara Province

İşletmelerin zayıf rekabetçi performanslarının nedeni olarak genellikle, pazar koşullarındaki ani değişimler ve/veya beklenmedik olaylar gösterilir. Ancak bu durum yöneticilerinin kendi kontrolü dışında oluşan koşullara ve faaliyetlere karşı bir tepkisidir. Oysa asıl neden, işletmelerin sürdürülebilir rekabetçi üstünlük için kaynak tabanlı uygulama ve pazarlama yeteneklerini geliştirme eksikliğidir. Bu eksikliğin doğal sonucu olarak, işletmelerin pazarlama yeteneklerini etkinleştirmesini engellenmekte ve rekabetçi üstünlüğün kaybedilmesine yol açmaktadır. Bu çalışma iki ana eksende tasarlanmış ve düzenlenmiştir: Birincisi işletmelerin sürdürülebilir rekabetçi üstünlük pazarlama yeteneklerinin önemi, İkincisi pazarlama yeteneklerinin işletme performansında anahtar öğe olarak düşünülmesi. Buna göre çalışma Ankara ili merkezli üretim işletmelerinin sürdürülebilir rekabetçi üstünlük elde edebilmelerinde pazarlama yeteneklerinin performans üzerindeki etkilerini belirlemeye yönelik görgül bir değerlendirmeyi kapsamaktadır. Araştırma amacı doğrultusunda 730 işletme yöneticisi ile görüşülerek anket yapılmış ve veriler toplanmış; Kısmi En Küçük Kareler (PLS) tekniği kullanılarak, oluşturulan yapısal modelin geçerliliği test edilmiştir. Araştırma sonucunda pazarlama yeteneklerinin işletme performansı üzerinde doğrudan ve pozitif etkisi olduğu görülmüştür. Sudden changes in market conditions and/or unexpected events are generally shown as the reason for weak competitive performances of enterprises. However, this is a reaction to the conditions and activities that occur outside the managers' control. The main reason, however, is the lack of development of resource-based practices and marketing capabilities for sustainable competitive advantage. As a natural consequence of this deficiency, the improving the efficiency of business marketing capabilities is hampered and competitive advantage is lost. In this context, this study has been designed and structured in two main axes: Importance of businesses' sustainable competitive advantage marketing capabilities, Considering marketing capabilities as a key element in business performance. Accordingly, the study includes a pragmatic assessment of the effects of the marketing capabilities on performance in determining the sustainable competitive advantage of the manufacturing enterprises in Ankara. In line with the purpose of the study, 730 business managers were interviewed and data were collected. Using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique, the validity of the constructed structural model was tested. As a result of the research, it has been seen that marketing capabilities have a direct and positive effect on business performance

The prognostic impact of comorbidity, nutritional and performance status on patients with diffuse large B cell lymphoma

Background: The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of nutritional status, comorbidity, and performance status on patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on 112 DLBCL patients who were diagnosed at our center between 2009 and 2018. Demographic and disease characteristics and laboratory test results were recorded. Assessments were made using the age-adjusted Charlson comorbidity index (CCI-A) for comorbidity, albumin level for nutritional status, and Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) score for performance status. Results: The mean age of the patients was found to be 62.63 ± 15.16 years. The ECOG score of 65 patients (69.1%) was in the range of 0-1. The mean follow-up time of the patients was determined to be 25.24 ± 25.11 months, and at the end of the follow-up period, 64 patients (57.1%) were survivors. The progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and 5-year OS rates of those with CCI-A > 4 were found to be significantly lower than those with CCI-A score ≤4 (P < 0.05). As a result of the Cox-Regression (Backward: LR method) analysis, ECOG and albumin levels were found to be independent risk factors for both OS and PFS (P < 0.05). Conclusion: This study demonstrated that CCI-A, ECOG, and nutritional status are independent prognostic markers for DLBCL patients. Initial evaluation of these patients should include all these parameters, which are easily available at the time of diagnosis

Haptic dokunma hisli ve kuvvet geri beslemeli arayüz sistem tasarımı

TÜBİTAK MAG01.07.2008“Haptic” cihaz, kullanıcı ile bilgisayar arasında üç boyutlu veri transferi sağlayan bir cihazdır. Bu cihaz kullanıcıya sanal ortamdaki bir nesneyi görmenin yanında, bu sanal nesneye dokunma olanağı da sağlar. Aynı zamanda bu cihaz ile gerçek bir nesneden veriler alınarak bu verilerin sanal ortamda kullanımı da gerçekleştirilebilir. Günümüzde sanal gerçeklik teknolojisinin gelişimine paralel olarak “haptic” cihazlarının kullanımı, sanayi, eğitim ve tıp alanlarında gittikçe artmaktadır. Bu teknolojinin değişik uygulama alanları, farklı bilim dallarına ait disiplinlerarası çalışmaları gerektirdiğinden, kendi içinde özgün çalışma konularını da yaratmaktadır (“haptic” arayüz tasarımı, serbest modelleme, sanal ortamda ameliyat eğitimi, vb.). Medikal uygulamalarda önemli bir potansiyele sahip bu teknoloji ile daha önceleri el işçiliği ile yapılmak zorunda kalınan karmaşık modifikasyonlar gerçekleştirilebilmektedir (beyin cerrahisinde hata kabul etmeyen, ustalık ve ameliyat öncesi uzun uğraşlar gerektiren operasyonlar). Bu örnek “haptic” cihazlar ile dijital ortamda gerçekleştirilebilecek olan uygulamalardan sadece bir tanesidir. Bu proje kapsamında, bahsedilen uygulama alanlarına yönelik 7 serbestlik dereceli bir “haptic” cihaz tasarlanıp üretilmiş ve cihazın kullanılabilirliğini göstermek için bir arayüz tasarlamıştır. Günümüze kadar tasarlanmış olan bütün “haptic” cihazlar maksimum 6 serbestlik derecesine sahiptirler. Tasarlanan 7 serbestlik dereceli “haptic” cihaz, bugüne kadar üretilmiş aynı uzuv uzunlukları ve eklem değişkenlerine sahip diğer “haptic” cihazlar ile karşılaştırıldığında yaklaşık %20 daha büyük bir çalışma hacmine ve daha esnek bir çalışma kabiliyetine sahiptir. Bu çalışma, Dünya’daki “haptic” cihazların geliştirilmesi ve Türkiye’deki “haptic” cihazların ve uygulama alanlarının yaygınlaşması açısından son derece önemlidir.Haptic devices are used to provide multi-modal data transfer between haptic users and computers in virtual reality applications. They enable humans to take force and tactile feedback from any virtual or remote objects. Haptic devices also facilitate the use of data collected from a real object in the virtual environment. Usage of the haptic devices increase more and more in industrial, educational and medical applications in parallel with development of virtual reality technology. As virtual reality technology requires interdisciplinary study with related to its application areas, it creates a lot of different specific working areas (Haptic interface design, freeform model, surgical operations in virtual environment etc.). Especially, some complex modifications which require hand-working can be performed with the system having great potential in medical applications (Brain surgery without error and operations which require great skill etc.). This is only one of the implementations of haptic devices in digital environment. Aim of this project is to design and manufacture a novel haptic device which serves the mentioned application areas and to improve an interface to implement the device. Most of the haptic devices in literature have maximum 6 DOF. The 7 DOF haptic device designed has about 20% extra working space and more flexible working capability compared to the other haptic devices with the similar link lengths and joint limitations. This project is important in terms of the development of haptic devices in the world as well as spreading of haptic devices and its applications in Turkey

Asymmetric intergroup bullying: the enactment and maintenance of societal inequality at work

What does inequality mean for dysfunctional organizational behaviours, such as workplace bullying? This article argues that workplace bullying can be understood as a manifestation of intergroup dynamics originating beyond the organization. We introduce the construct of asymmetric intergroup bullying: the disproportionate mistreatment of members of low status groups, with the intended effect of enhancing the subordination of that group in society at large. Analysis of data from 38 interviews with public and private sector workers in Turkey depicts a pattern of asymmetric intergroup bullying, undertaken to achieve organizational and broader sociopolitical goals. Respondents reported bullying acts used to get rid of unwanted personnel, with the goal of avoiding severance pay, or of removing supporters of the former government from positions of political and economic influence. Bullying was also described as working towards the dominance of the sociocultural worldview of one political group over another. We discuss asymmetric intergroup bullying as one mechanism through which acute intergroup hierarchy in the broader society corrupts management practice and employee interactions, in turn exacerbating economic inequality along group lines

The Dark Sides of Social Policy: From Neoliberalism to Resurgent Right-wing Populism

This Forum Debate explores the confluence of neoliberal, populist, conservative and reactionary influences on contemporary ideologies and practices of social policy, with a focus on the poorer peripheries of global

Distributive politics and regional development: assessing the territorial distribution of Turkey’s public investment

Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’

S3-TM: scalable streaming short text matching

Micro-blogging services have become major venues for information creation, as well as channels of information dissemination. Accordingly, monitoring them for relevant information is a critical capability. This is typically achieved by registering content-based subscriptions with the micro-blogging service. Such subscriptions are long-running queries that are evaluated against the stream of posts. Given the popularity and scale of micro-blogging services like Twitter and Weibo, building a scalable infrastructure to evaluate these subscriptions is a challenge. To address this challenge, we present the S3-TM system for streaming short text matching. S3-TM is organized as a stream processing application, in the form of a data parallel flow graph designed to be run on a data center environment. It takes advantage of the structure of the publications (posts) and subscriptions to perform the matching in a scalable manner, without broadcasting publications or subscriptions to all of the matcher instances. The basic design of S$$^3$$3-TM uses a scoped multicast for publications and scoped anycast for subscriptions. To further improve throughput, we introduce publication routing algorithms that aim at minimizing the scope of the multicasts. First set of algorithms we develop are based on partitioning the word co-occurrence frequency graph, with the aim of routing posts that include commonly co-occurring words to a small set of matchers. While effective, these algorithms fell short in balancing the load. To address this, we develop the SALB algorithm, which provides better load balance by modeling the load more accurately using the word-to-post bipartite graph. We also develop a subscription placement algorithm, called LASP, to group together similar subscriptions, in order to minimize the subscription matching cost. Furthermore, to achieve good scalability for increasing number of nodes, we introduce techniques to handle workload skew. Finally, we introduce load shedding techniques for handling unexpected load spikes with small impact on the accuracy. Our experimental results show that S3-TM is scalable. Furthermore, the SALB algorithm provides more than 2.5× throughput compared to the baseline multicast and outperforms the graph partitioning-based approaches. © 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Market, morality and (just) price: the case of recycling economy in Turkey

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst waste-pickers and recycling traders in the waste paper, plastic and scrap metal sectors, and engaging with literature from economic anthropology and history, as well as archival sources, this paper documents changing perceptions of just price, morality and fairness in the Turkish recycling market. The paper suggests that multiple markets imply multiple prices, which are contingent and contested. When dealing with price mechanisms largely outside their control, actors tend to associate a fair price with the going market price, rather than factors such as state regulation. Approaches to morality and assessments of fairness become more ambiguous when prices are mediated by actors? own practices. These range from gift relations to paternalism, envy and deception