Wanting to change the world, is it too much of a good thing? How sustainable orientation shapes entrepreneurial behaviour

Purpose: When pursuing a sustainable orientation (SO), entrepreneurs can resolve environmental and social problems and act as change agents by pursuing opportunities related to market failures. While many studies focus on entrepreneurial intention, very few try to explain entrepreneurial behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the circumstances under which people could be led to become sustainable entrepreneurs. It examines the effect of SO, as well as the entrepreneurial motivation to change society as key drivers of entrepreneurial behaviour. Design/methodology/approach: The hypotheses were tested in three waves (six-month interval) on a sample of 197 university students that are neither entrepreneurs, nor involved in any entrepreneurial processes. The authors measured entrepreneurial behaviour as a dependent variable and used subjective norms towards entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial attitude as well as entrepreneurial motivation and SO as independent variables. Findings: Contrary to the expectations, sustainability orientation has a negative impact on entrepreneurial action. However, individuals who think that entrepreneurship can change society (instrumentality) exhibit higher entrepreneurial action. Furthermore, this belief positively moderates the negative impact of SO on entrepreneurial action. In other words, if someone thinks that entrepreneurship can change the world, not only he/she is more inclined to engage in entrepreneurial actions but their values of SO will not decrease their entrepreneurial action. Research limitations/implications: A longer timeframe of longitudinal research is needed to overcome the limitation regarding the assessment of entrepreneurial action. Practical implications: As a practical implication, educators who want to engage their institution as an engine of change towards sustainable development could highlight cases of sustainable businesses where profits, environmental and social issues were not neglected to improve the perceived feasibility and thus, entrepreneurial action. Originality/value: Results demonstrate the negative effect of SO on entrepreneurship as a career choice, but not for those who believe that they can change society through this mean. This research highlights the relevance of Socio Cognitive Career Theory in the field of entrepreneurship, especially the neglected effect of outcome expectations on entrepreneurship as a career choice. © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

Canadian Immigration Policies: Securing a Security Paradigm?

Security is increasingly becoming a main concern in Canadian society. Post 9/11, the challenge for Canada is to strike a balance between maintaining the flow of immigration necessary for its demographic and economic development and projecting an image of openness at a time when security measures are globally being strengthened. In the post-9/11 context, it is important to assess the extent to which security concerns have infiltrated policy discourse and choices to evaluate whether these concerns are changing the overall objectives and goals pursued by the Canadian government through policy realms such as immigration. We argue that the security logic has become embedded since 9/11. Although security concerns were becoming increasingly prevalent through the 1990s, the post-9/11 period has allowed the security agenda to prevail over the human rights agenda and concerns for civil liberties. The emphasis on criminal law to address terrorism and the use of immigration policy to impose security measures is a step away from upholding goals of social justice, equality, and openness that are still central to its policies. The paper addresses these concerns and examines options to allow human rights and citizenship rights concerns to prevail.La sécurité est devenue une préoccupation importante au sein de la société canadienne. Après les événements du 11 septembre 2001, le défi auquel font face les autorités canadiennes est d’établir un équilibre entre la nécessité de maintenir le niveau d’immigration nécessaire pour répondre aux besoins démographiques et économiques tout en continuant à projeter une image d’ouverture dans un contexte marqué par un renforcement des mesures de sécurité. Il importe d’évaluer dans quelle mesure les préoccupations liées à la sécurité ont infiltré le discours et les choix politiques et ont modifié les objectifs et les buts poursuivis dans le domaine de l’immigration. Nous soutenons que la logique sécuritaire s’est implantée dans le discours et les pratiques depuis le 11 septembre 2001. Bien que les inquiétudes autour des questions liées à la sécurité aient été présentes de manière plus marquée au cours des années 1990, la période qui a suivi le 11 septembre 2001 a fait en sorte que l’agenda sécuritaire a pris le pas sur les préoccupations liées aux droits de la personne et aux libertés civiles. L’accent mis sur le droit criminel pour contrer le terrorisme et le recours à la politique d’immigration pour imposer des mesures sécuritaires éloigne le Canada des objectifs portant sur des considérations de justice sociale, d’égalité et d’ouverture. Cet article se penche sur ces enjeux et identifie les options permettant de recentrer l’attention sur les droits de la personne et les droits citoyens

Simulation of the postoperative trunk appearance in scoliosis surgery

Persistence of external trunk asymmetry after scoliosis surgical treatment is frequent and difficult to predict by clinicians. This is a significant problem considering that correction of the apparent deformity is a major factor of satisfaction for the patients. A simulation of the correction on the external appearance would allow the clinician to illustrate to the patient the potential result of the surgery and would help in deciding on a surgical strategy that could most improve his/her appearance. We describe a method to predict the scoliotic trunk shape after a spine surgical intervention. The capability of our method was evaluated using real data of scoliotic patients. Results of the qualitative evaluation were very promising and a quantitative evaluation based on the comparison of the simulated and the actual postoperative trunk surface showed an adequate accuracy for clinical assessment. The required short simulation time also makes our approach an eligible candidate for a clinical environment demanding interactive simulations.CIHR / IRS

Tetrahedral Mesh Generation with Good Dihedral Angles Using Point Lattices

Three-dimensional meshes are frequently used to perform physical simulations in science and engineering. This involves decomposing a domain into a mesh of small elements, usually tetrahedra or hexahedra. The elements must be of good quality; in particular there should be no plane or dihedral angle close to 0 or 180 degrees. Automatically creating such meshes for complicated domains is a challenging problem, especially guaranteeing good dihedral angles, a goal that has eluded researchers for nearly two decades. By using point lattices, notably the body centered cubic lattice, we develop two tetrahedral mesh generation algorithms that, for the first time, come with meaningful guarantees on the quality of the elements. For domains bounded by an isosurface, we generate a tetrahedral mesh whose dihedral angles are bounded between 10.7 and 164.8 degrees, or (with a change in parameters) between 8.9 and 158.8 degrees. The algorithm is numerically robust and easy to implement because it generates tetrahedra from a small set of precomputed stencils. The algorithm is so fast that it can be invoked at each time step of a simulation, possibly in real time for small meshes. The tetrahedra are uniformly sized on the boundary, but in the interior it i

Sliver Removal by Lattice Refinement

I present an algorithm that can provably eliminate slivers in the interior of a tetrahedral mesh, leaving only tetrahedra with dihedral angles between 30 and 135 degrees and radiusedge ratios of at most 1.368, except near the boundary. In comparison, previous bounds on dihedral angles were microscopic. The final mesh can respect specified input vertices and a user-defined sizing function. The algorithm comes with a bound on the sizes of the features it creates, and can provably grade from small to large tetrahedra

Graph embeddings and approximate graph coloring

We describe how to embed a graph into a small n-dimensional hypersphere such that the endpoints of any edge are placed exactly one unit of distance apart. As an application, we show how such an embedding can be used to find large independent sets in sparse 3-colorable graphs. By combining this algorithm with another which is specialized in dense graphs, we obtain a randomized, polynomial time algorithm that can color any 3-colorable graph using at most O(n1/4 log 1/2n) colors