Unfolding the role of marketplace resources in forming entrepreneurial narratives

The narrative perspective has discussed the role of entrepreneurs as mindful actors who contextualise innovation through their relational, temporal, and performative efforts. Although the agency of material elements is recognised in the narrative perspective, the materials’ role is reduced to be controlled and mobilised by entrepreneurs with some existing possibilities of showing resistance. This reductionist approach toward materials has restricted our understanding of the ways materials actively impose their agency, form narratives, and contextualise innovations along with entrepreneurs. This study adopts ANT (Actor-Network Theory) as a lens and explores the role of materials in entrepreneurship process. Specifically, it explores how materials (non-human actors) interact with entrepreneurs, impose their agency, challenge the efforts of entrepreneurs in contextualising innovation, and in turn shape the emerging entrepreneurial narratives

From "participant" to "friend": the role of Facebook engagement in ethnographic research

Engaging with participants on Facebook during ethnographic fieldwork has become increasingly prevalent in research, especially when exploring complex and sensitive consumption issues (Chenail, 2011; Piacenti et al., 2014). Such engagement not only provides a complementary medium of communication but also provides a context and a source of data from which emic and etic interpretations can be made (Baker, 2013; Dogruer et al., 2011). Despite, extant literature focuses predominantly on "how-to" aspects of integrating Facebook in ethnographic research (Baker, 2013), thus, creating a need to amiliorate epistemological and methodological issues of integrating Facebook in ethnographic research. For example, further research can help ethnographic researchers to understand the ways in which Facebook, as a methodological tool in ethnographic research, can encourage close rapport with participants leading to rich and thick interpretations of complex phenomena. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to theorise epistemological and methodological implications of integrating Facebook in conventional ethnographic research. Accordingly, we present three research questions. Firstly, how to engage with participants on their Facebook profiles to build a productive rapport with them during ethnographic fieldwork? Building on friendship theories (Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014; Tillmann-Healy, 2003), we suggest that Facebook engagement encourages rapport building by enabling researchers to gradually develop dialogical researcher-participant relationships by paying close attention to aspects such as practice, pace, context, and the 'ethics of friendships' (Tillmann-Healy, 2003). Secondly, what challenges inherent to conventional ethnographic research does increased rapport enable researchers to overcome? We propose that Facebook helps overcome three challenges inherent to conventional ethnography: 1) negotiating access and immersion, 2) developing multiple perspectives, and 3) providing rich and thick interpretations. Thirdly, how Facebook engagement enables the navigation of these challenges? Our findings contribute to consumer and cross disciplinary ethnographic literature (Baker, 2013; Piacenti et al., 2014) and provide evidence that utilising Facebook allows researchers to overcome such challenges by expanding the researcher's field, improving participants' trust and confidence of the researcher, bringing both insider and outsider perspectives, and diluting the power hierarchy often found in participant-researcher relationships. However, we also propose that our contributions have implications beyond conventional ethnography and are relevant to wider netnographic(Kozinets, 2010; 2015) and social mediaoriented ethnographic research (Postill and Pink, 2012). Our proposed framework could be useful for netnographic researchers seeking to build a close rapport with participants as it sheds light on epistemological and methodological issues about one of the popular social networking sites that provides, as Kozinets (2015, p. 35) classifies, a "hyving social experience". In addition, we also contribute to an emerging body of cross-disciplinary literature on "friendship as method" (Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014; Ellis, 2007; Glesne, 1989; Tillmann-Healy, 2003) by theorising the role of Facebook engagement in inspiring and sustaining 'friendships' with participants during ethnographic research. We have structured the paper as follows: Firstly, we engage with cross-disciplinary literature on ethnography, netnography, theories of friendship, and Facebook. Secondly, we introduce the research methodology, and the overarching ethnographic research process. Thirdly, we draw from our ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate how integrating Facebook facilitates friendships with participants and allows us to investigate deeper and richer details of their everyday lived experiences during important transitions, in our case, the transition from single to marital status. Finally, we discuss some of the important ethical/moral implications of "friendship as method" and the complexities of integrating Facebook in ethnographic research and elaborate on the ways in which we addressed such complexities

Setting up home: The role of domestic materiality in extended family identity formation

This paper examines the role of domestic materiality in the construction of extended family identity. It investigates how extended family members experience tensions during new family formation and the ways in which materiality contributes to the resolution of these tensions and the construction of a new family identity. Our findings suggest that the intersubjectivities centred on domestic material objects cause tensions in relationships. However, it is through a process of negotiation stimulated by these intersubjectivities that a new extended family identity emerges. We identify four materiality capacities in this process of negotiation: catalysing, associating, disassociating, and bridging. We posit that these negotiations are an essential part of the process of identity formation given that they motivate a new understanding of competing family discourses, changes to individual and collective status, and a restructuring of family, especially family structure, character, and intergenerational orientation

Obituary

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43539/1/11120_2004_Article_354344.pd

Feminist academic organizations: Challenging sexism through collective mobilizing across research, support, and advocacy

This paper examines the establishment of a feminist academic organization, GENMAC (Gender, Markets, and Consumers; genmac.co), serving gender scholars in business schools and related fields. In so doing, it builds on the emerging literature of feminist academic organizations, as situated within feminist organizational studies (FOS). Through a feminist case study and by assessing the reflections of GENMAC\u27s board members, we tell the story of the emergence of GENMAC and detail the tensions the organization encountered as it formally established itself as a feminist organization within the confines of a business school setting, a patriarchal system, and a neoliberal university paradigm. We build on the FOS literature by considering how our organization counters cultures of heightened individualism and builds collective action to challenge sexism through the nexus of research, support, and advocacy pillars of our organization. We demonstrate how, through these actions, our organization challenges hierarchies of knowledge, prioritizes the care and support needed for the day-to-day survival of gender scholars in business schools, and spotlights and challenges structural inequalities and injustices in the academy

Predicting habitat suitability and connectivity for management and conservation of urban wildlife: a real-time web application for grassland water voles

1. Natural habitats in urban areas provide benefits for both humans and biodiversity. However, to achieve biodiversity gains, we require new techniques to determine habitat suitability and ecological connectivity that will inform urban planning and development. 2. Using an example of an urban population of water voles Arvicola amphibius, we developed a habitat suitability model and a resistance-surface-based model of landscape connectivity to identify potential connectivity between areas of suitable habitat. We then updated the environmental variables according to new urban development plans and used our models to generate spatially explicit predictions of both habitat suitability and connectivity. 3. To make models accessible to urban and conservation planners, we developed an interactive mapping tool that provided users with a graphical user interface (GUI) to inform conservation planning for this species. 4. The model found that habitat suitability for water voles was related to the proportion and distance from key environmental variables, such as built-up areas and urban green spaces, while the connectivity model identified important corridors connecting areas of potential distribution for this species. 5. Future development plans altered the potential spatial distribution of the water vole population, reducing the extent of suitable habitat in some core areas. The interactive mapping tool made available suitable habitat and connectivity maps for conservation managers to assess new planning applications and for the development of a conservation action plan for water voles. 6. Synthesis and applications. We believe this approach provides a framework for future development of nature conservation tools that can be used by planners to inform ecological decision-making, increase biodiversity and reduce human–wildlife conflict in urban environments

Health, education, and social care provision after diagnosis of childhood visual disability

Aim: To investigate the health, education, and social care provision for children newly diagnosed with visual disability.Method: This was a national prospective study, the British Childhood Visual Impairment and Blindness Study 2 (BCVIS2), ascertaining new diagnoses of visual impairment or severe visual impairment and blindness (SVIBL), or equivalent vi-sion. Data collection was performed by managing clinicians up to 1-year follow-up, and included health and developmental needs, and health, education, and social care provision.Results: BCVIS2 identified 784 children newly diagnosed with visual impairment/SVIBL (313 with visual impairment, 471 with SVIBL). Most children had associated systemic disorders (559 [71%], 167 [54%] with visual impairment, and 392 [84%] with SVIBL). Care from multidisciplinary teams was provided for 549 children (70%). Two-thirds (515) had not received an Education, Health, and Care Plan (EHCP). Fewer children with visual impairment had seen a specialist teacher (SVIBL 35%, visual impairment 28%, χ2p < 0.001), or had an EHCP (11% vs 7%, χ2p < 0 . 01).Interpretation: Families need additional support from managing clinicians to access recommended complex interventions such as the use of multidisciplinary teams and educational support. This need is pressing, as the population of children with visual impairment/SVIBL is expected to grow in size and complexity.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio