The gendered impact of the financial crisis:Struggles over social reproduction in Greece

The global financial crisis has triggered a dramatic transformation of employment in the weakest Eurozone economies. This is evidenced in deteriorating work conditions, limited employee negotiating power, low pay, zero-hours contracts and, most importantly, periods of prolonged unemployment for most of the working population, especially women. We offer a critical analysis of the boundaries of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive work, and explore how austerity policies implemented in Greece in the aftermath of the global financial crisis have transformed women’s everyday lives. In contributing to critical discussions of neoliberal capitalism and recent feminist geography studies, our empirical study focuses on how women’s struggles over social reproduction unfold in the public and private spheres. It proposes that women’s temporary retreat to unpaid work at home constitutes a form of resistance to intensifying precarisation, and, at times, contributes to the emergence of new collective forms of reproduction.</p

Formal and Informal Financing Decisions of Small Businesses

This study investigates small businesses’ financing decisions. Drawing upon asymmetric information theory, institutional theory and relevant literature on cognitive financial constraints, human capital and social capital, we propose a theoretical framework in which financing determinants come from three dimensions: entrepreneurs’ individual factors, organisational (firm-level) factors and contextual (institutional) factors. We employ this model to distinguish four types of firms: (1) firms that use no external finance, (2) firms that use informal finance only, (3) firms that use formal finance only and (4) firms that use both formal and informal finance. An empirical test on Vietnamese small businesses shows that factors from all three dimensions are important in understanding small businesses’ financing decisions

X-ray diffraction mapping of strain fields and chemical composition of SiGe : Si(001) quantum dot molecules

A variety of surface morphologies can be formed by controlling kinetic parameters during heteroepitaxial film growth. The system reported is a Si0.7Ge0.3 film grown by molecular beam epitaxy at 550 degrees C and a 1 A/s deposition rate, producing quantum dot molecule (QDM) structures. These nanostructures are very uniform in size and shape, allowing strain mapping and chemical composition evaluation by means of anomalous x-ray diffraction in a grazing incidence geometry. Tensile and compressed regions coexist inside QDMs, in accordance with the finite-element calculations of lattice relaxation. The Ge content was found to vary significantly within the structures, and to be quite different from the nominal composition.731

Do ethnic minorities “stretch” their time? UK household evidence on multitasking

Time use, Multitasking, Ethnic minorities, UK, J22, J15,