Social entrepreneurship. The contribution of individual entrepreneurs to sustainable development

Social entrepreneurship is a phenomenon that has resisted attempts to establish a clear definition. A focus on organizational structures and/or what constitutes a worthy social cause has created a diverse set of terminology. Observing the positive social impact of entrepreneurs catering to basic needs, this paper recognizes their unique role in efficiently contributing to the achievement of sustainable development goals. From this perspective, the term "social" can be much better defined. The frameworks proposed in this paper should guide much-needed further research and facilitate decision making about more focused support from a financial as well as a learning perspective.Social entrepreneurship; sustainable development; value creation; needs;

Organizational mechanisms of inclusive growth: A critical realist perspective on scaling

We investigate the challenge how the outcomes of innovation for inclusive growth, the novel organizational recipes, can be scaled to match the dimension of poverty. We conceptualize scaling as sustained event regularities between doing A and expected outcomes B. Building on a critical realist perspective, we develop an analytical framework of organizational closure and apply it to an extreme case, an organization with an inclusive growth model that has sustained event regularities for more than two decades. Our analysis reveals closure as an organizational competence with important implications for achieving scale in the context of poverty. We develop of a number of propositions between the link of organizational closure and scaling with implications for practice and further academic research.Organizational closure; social entrepreneurship; counterfactual analysis; retroduction;

Rating Research Performance in the Humanities: An Interim Report on an Initiative of the German Wissenschaftsrat

The author, a professor of English linguistics at Freiburg University, was a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) from 2006 to 2012 and, in this capacity, was involved in this advisory body’s rating and assessment activities. The present contribution focusses on issues arising in the rating of research output in the humanities and is informed by his dual perspective, as planner and organizer of the ratings undertaken by the Wissenschaftsrat and as a rated scholar in his own discipline, English and American Studies

Cyber-Naija and Homegirls on the Web: Creating Place in Cyberspace

The present contribution is offered as an essay in linguistically informed cultural studies. It emerges from the author's research on language use in postcolonial diasporic web-forums from West Africa(Nigeria, Cameroon) and the Caribbean (Jamaica). The theoretical foundations and methodological principles of the research are described in detail elsewhere (Mair 2012, 2013, 2014; Mair & Heyd, 2014). For the present purpose, the facts discussed here are important

Machine-readable text corpora and the linguistic description of languages

"To understand the role of machine-readable text corpora in linguistics it is necessary to consider the four possible sources of data for the linguist, viz. (1) the analyst's own introspection/ intuition, (2) more or less systematically conducted elicitation experiments with groups of native speakers of the language studied, (3) collections of authentic spoken or written citations gathered unsystematically, and (4) evidence extracted systematically from a well-defined corpus of texts. After a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the various sources of data, I will briefly exemplify recent advances made in the corpus-based description of languages that have become possible as a result of the application of computer technology to linguistics and then go on to present the major databases currently available for the study of English and German." (author's abstract

Corpus-Approaches to the New English Web: Post-Colonial Diasporic Forums in West Africa and the Caribbean

The present contribution reports on research carried out since November 2011 in the framework of the project 'Cyber-Creole' funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG MA 1652/9). The Cyber-Creole project is complemented by 'RomWeb' (DFG PF 699/4), which is headed by Stefan Pfänder of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Freiburg, Germany. The two projects both use data downloaded from web-based forums, employ identical strategies of data collection and mark-up and have developed a shared search and analysis interface, NCAT (= Net Corpora Administration Tool). The two projects also share a similar general theoretical orientation, being motivated by an interest in how the new media impact on the spread of standard and non-standard varieties of European ex-colonial languages in conditions of economic, political, cultural and media globalisation. In this regard, their work is intended to make a substantial contribution to the emerging research paradigm of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert 2010, Coupland, ed. 2010, Mair 2013, Mair and Pfänder (forthcoming)). The present brief survey will introduce the theoretical stance the "English" branch of the project takes in the context of contemporary World Englishes research (section 1). Building on this, I will introduce the analytical tool-kit which we have developed to study computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the diasporasat the centre of our attention (section 2) and describe the sociolinguistic profile of the "Cyber -Jamaican" and "CyberNigerian" developed by two such groups (sections 3 and 4). The conclusion (section 5) will summarise the most important insights and outline perspectives for further work

The embeddedness of social entrepreneurship: Understanding variation across local communities

Social enterprise organizations (SEOs) arise from entrepreneurial activities with the aim of achieving social goals. SEOs have been seen as alternative and/or complementary to the actions of governments and international organizations to address poverty and poverty-related social needs. Using a number of illustrative cases, we explore how variations in local institutional mechanisms shape the local "face of poverty" in different communities and how this relates to variations in the emergence and strategic orientations of SEOs. We develop a model of the productive opportunity space for SEOs as a basis of, and an inspiration for, further scholarly inquiry.social entrepreneurship; Social mechanisms; poverty; opportunity; institutions;

Sustainable development: How social entrepreneurs make it happen

This paper demonstrates that entrepreneurs who have created innovative organizations and service provision models are contributing to sustainable development. The processes, structures and outcomes of their initiatives are contrasted with more traditional efforts. World leaders have recently renewed the momentum for 'buying' sustainable development through massive allocation of development funds. The authors argue that such traditional approaches have repeatedly failed in the past and are unlikely to overcome the more fundamental hurdles to create development. Building on the findings of a three-year research project, the paper presents case studies which demonstrate how so-called 'social entrepreneurs' succeed in creating social and economic development in a poor country context. The process of discovery and creation from the ground up, in contrast to traditional design-driven development processes and strategies, is illustrated. The cases show how social entrepreneurs cater to various levels of needs: the basic needs of individuals, the institutional needs of communities, and the needs of future generations. The impact of social entrepreneurial activity on sustainable development measures such as the Millennium Development Goals is demonstrated. The findings suggest that social innovation may change the very structures and systems that recreate the circumstances for poverty and that development processes need to consider the link between social and economic development.social entrepreneurship; sustainable development;

Minimum Data Requirements For Integrating Urban Development And Urban Water Infrastructure Models

Data quality and availability is a common problem in many modelling studies dealing with regional, spatially distributed case studies. This is true for both, urban development models and urban water management models. As current research in urban water management more and more tries to benefit from an integrated view of the performance of water networks in the context of dynamically growing and shrinking cities, this problem of data scarcity increases. Having different applications with different levels of details available, the question arises which data (and which temporal and spatial resolution) is really necessary to be collected in a modeling study with a certain modeling aim. This work tackles this question by running an integrated urban development and urban water model with different detail levels of input data. The approach uses variations in quality (temporal and spatial) of input data for simulating urban development (population data & projections) and given data on existing city structures (e.g. buildings, road network). Permutations of the given information propagated through the urban development model represent several scenarios to calculate parameters for the urban water models (effective impervious area (EIA), dry weather flow (DWF) and water supply demand (WSD)) As urban water models in this study SWMM (storm water management model) for drainage systems and EPAnet for water supply systems is used. Consequently the impact of the input data variation on the results of the hydraulic and hydrodynamic simulations is statistically analyzed using different performance indicators: EIA in relation to ponded volume, DWF to flow velocities and WSD to system pressure clustered by input data. For comparison reasons simulation runs with a well-established urban development model are conducted

Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena: ethnomethodology and the question of 'method' in the social sciences

Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after‐the‐fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science research are, however, relatively scarce. Ethnomethodology was an early and prominent attempt to treat social science methodology as a topic for sociological investigations and, in this paper, we draw out what we see as its distinctive contribution: namely, a focus on troubles as features of the in situ, practical accomplishment of method, in particular, the way that research outcomes are shaped by the local practices of investigators in response to the troubles they encounter along the way. Based on two case studies, we distinguish methodological troubles as problems and methodological troubles as phenomena to be studied, and suggest the latter orientation provides an alternate starting point for addressing social scientists’ investigative practices