E-readiness and Entrepreneurship: A Cross Country Study of the Link between Technological Infrastructure and Entrepreneurial Activity

This current study focuses on the relationship between a country’s e-readiness environment and entrepreneurial activities. Many government policies assume there is a direct causal relationship between e-readiness and entrepreneurial activity and some past studies have reported evidence supporting such a link. In this paper, a cross country panel data analysis using three different measures of entrepreneurial activity and different measures of e-readiness examines this relationship. The results of this study provide only weak support for the hypothesized relationship. Furthermore, the results appear to be very sensitive to the choice of proxy variables chosen to represent entrepreneurial activity and the different measures of e-readiness

An Empirical Investigation into the Size of Small Businesses

A fundamental understanding of small businesses begins with an adequate definition of what constitutes a small business. Often the definition of a small business incorporates the definitions employed by the Small Business Administration (SBA) which, in part, uses the number of employees as the definitive measure. This paper examines the SBA’s definitions of a small business which use the number of employees as the standard. We find little evidence that supports the use of SBA definitions or any definition that relies on the number of employees

Revolving Asset-Based Lending Contracts and the Resolution of Debt-Related Agency Problems

Small firms that do not have access to organized financial markets must often rely on secured commercial loans for their debt financing. In large firms, debt-related agency problems are often resolved through the bond pricing process in the formal debt markets. When these same debt-related agency problems arise in small, private firms, the structure of the secured lending agreement must resolve these problems. This study identifies debt-related agency problems as they exist in private firms and examines howf the lending agreement resolves these problems

Characteristics of therapeutic alliance in musculoskeletal physiotherapy and occupational therapy practice: A scoping review of the literature

© 2017 The Author(s). Background: Most conventional treatment for musculoskeletal conditions continue to show moderate effects, prompting calls for ways to increase effectiveness, including drawing from strategies used across other health conditions. Therapeutic alliance refers to the relational processes at play in treatment which can act in combination or independently of specific interventions. Current evidence guiding the use of therapeutic alliance in health care arises largely from psychotherapy and medicine literature. The objective of this review was to map out the available literature on therapeutic alliance conceptual frameworks, themes, measures and determinants in musculoskeletal rehabilitation across physiotherapy and occupational therapy disciplines. Methods: A scoping review of the literature published in English since inception to July 2015 was conducted using Medline, EMBASE, PsychINFO, PEDro, SportDISCUS, AMED, OTSeeker, AMED and the grey literature. A key search term strategy was employed using physiotherapy , occupational therapy , therapeutic alliance , and musculoskeletal to identify relevant studies. All searches were performed between December 2014 and July 2015 with an updated search on January 2017. Two investigators screened article title, abstract and full text review for articles meeting the inclusion criteria and extracted therapeutic alliance data and details of each study. Results: One hundred and thirty articles met the inclusion criteria including quantitative (33%), qualitative (39%), mixed methods (7%) and reviews and discussions (23%) and most data came from the USA (23%). Randomized trials and systematic reviews were 4.6 and 2.3% respectively. Low back pain condition (22%) and primary care (30.7%) were the most reported condition and setting respectively. One theory, 9 frameworks, 26 models, 8 themes and 42 subthemes of therapeutic alliance were identified. Twenty-six measures were identified; the Working Alliance Inventory (WAI) was the most utilized measure (13%). Most of the therapeutic alliance themes extracted were from patient perspectives. The relationship between adherence and therapeutic alliance was examined by 26 articles of which 57% showed some correlation between therapeutic alliance and adherence. Age moderated the relationship between therapeutic alliance and adherence with younger individuals and an autonomy support environment reporting improved adherence. Prioritized goals, autonomy support and motivation were facilitators of therapeutic alliance. Conclusion: Therapeutic Alliance has been studied in a limited extent in the rehabilitation literature with conflicting frameworks and findings. Potential benefits described for enhancing therapeutic alliance might include better exercise adherence. Several knowledge gaps have been identified with a potential for generating future research priorities for therapeutic alliance in musculoskeletal rehabilitation

Dying to Be Heard: The Construction of (Dis)empowered Female Bodies through Illness in Late Nineteenth-Century German Fiction

This thesis undertakes a detailed exploration of Theodor Fontane’s Cécile and Effi Briest, Hedwig Dohm’s Werde, die Du bist! and Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie, novels which are critically engaged in a search for a textured understanding of the complex processes that govern the female illness experience. The following analysis examines the figure of the malaised female protagonist in these works to demonstrate how late nineteenth-century literary representations of female illness and death depict a causal nexus between social ills and female affliction. It argues that through the portrayal of their protagonists’ decline, the selected novels provide an indictment of the pathogenicity of salient socio-cultural, familial, medical and religious ideologies. In so doing, these texts contest traditional medical discourse on the aetiology of female affliction, which conceptualised invalidism largely as the ineluctable product of volatile female biology, and instead reveal female pathology to be the unfortunate consequence of a woman’s arduous and often dispiriting navigation of her social landscape. Yet for all the suffering that their protagonists endure, these novels refuse to frame female affliction and death solely within the narrow and devalorised parameters of pathology, and instead explore the deviant, escapist and redemptive potential of the disordered womanly mind and body. As the protagonists appropriate the somatic expressivity of their illnesses and final moments to articulate their discontent and frustration with the rigid definition of normative femininity, they stage a protest against the social forces that precipitated their illnesses in the first place. The authors do not necessarily portray the cultural experience of female affliction as an empowering pathology in order to endorse it as an exemplary strategy of feminist resistance. Rather, by depicting how their protagonists feel compelled to seize the dissident capacity of their maladies, they problematise the late nineteenth-century cultural landscape that left such women so desperate to carve out a space for their own autonomy that they embraced the sick role to do so. This thesis conceptualises illness as the shared site at which power operates and resistance is generated. It challenges the contention that female invalidism is an inherently disempowering state, and stakes a claim for literary female affliction and death as disenfranchising yet simultaneously liberating and, above all, socially critical forces