Research Regarding Connections between Risks and Processes within Small and Medium Enterprises

AbstractBusiness process approach is a current concern for many scholars and practitioners as the performance of any organization is directly influenced on how the objectives of these activities are achieved. The methodology framework consists of a literature review regarding the main concepts which are underlying the connection between risk and process. Main findings of the study will comprise of identifying the risks along with the trigger causes or circumstances and their potential effect not only on the activity, but also on the overall process. The importance to detect the risks whose impact has critical effect on the SMEs activity in terms of sustainable development and business continuity will be emphasized. In this respect, the potential processes highly exposed to risks are the most reliable indicators highlighting where an SME is vulnerable and to where should resources be directed to. A clear understanding of the types and intensity of the relationships and interactions between processes and their particular risks leads to cost effective decisions regarding undertaking long term mitigating strategies. The awareness of the link between different types of processes with their specific risks has become highly important as the overall vulnerability of an enterprise is enlarging in line with the business development

Regional Variety of Biotechnology Development in Asia

AbstractToday's biotechnology is widely regarded as a one of the most important sectors of the technology, a new wave of knowledge- based economy. It is characterized by innovation and a very fast pace of development, which is connected with the involvement of highly qualified specialists, research centers, varied sources of information, investments, as well as interconnections to guarantee the flow of information. Potentially, biotechnology has a wide range of applications, such as the food industry, production of genetically modified organisms, pharmaceutics, healthcare, detergents and bioremediation, forestry and agriculture. There is a huge variety in the world when it comes to the structure and space where the biotech development occurs. According to the collected data, there is an obvious dominant role of highly developed countries such as the United States and European countries: the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Sweden as well as Canada. Nevertheless the dynamic expansion of biotechnology occurs in new centers of biotech development in eastern European countries such as Lithuania and Slovakia as well as in Asian countries, including Turkey, India, South Korea and Japan. Furthermore, biotech development is determined by several factors. A distance from scientific centers, location of universities, financial sources and international cooperation must be taken into consideration. Country policies also come as the major determinants. With the Internet and common access to a very sophisticated piece of information and a very fast-developing technology, it's even easier for the biotech to make a step forward

Subprime consumer credit demand: evidence from a lender's pricing experiment

We test the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company. What is novel about our contribution is that we were given details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender between October 2006 and January 2007. We find that individuals who tend to utilize their credit limits fully do not reduce their demand for credit when subject to increases in interest rates as high as 3 percentage points. This finding is naturally interpreted as evidence of binding liquidity constraints. We also demonstrate the importance of truly exogenous variation in interest rates when estimating credit demand elasticities. We show that estimating a standard credit demand equation with nonexperimental variation leads to seriously biased estimates even when conditioning on a rich set of controls and individual fixed effects. In particular, this procedure results in a large and statistically significant 3-month elasticity of credit card debt with respect to interest rates even though the experimental estimate of the same elasticity is neither economically nor statistically different from zero. JEL Classification: D11, D12, D14liquidity constraints, randomized trials, subprime credit

Labor market institutions and the business cycle Unemployment rigidities vs. real wage rigidities

This paper investigates the importance of labor market institutions for inflation and unemployment dynamics. Using the New Keynesian framework we argue that labor market institutions should be divided into those institutions that cause Unemployment Rigidities (UR) and those that cause Real Wage Rigidities (RWR). The two types of institutions have opposite effects and their interaction is crucial for the dynamics of inflation and unemployment. We estimate a panel VAR with deterministically varying coefficients and find that there is a profound difference in the responses of unemployment and inflation to shocks under different constellations of the labor market. JEL Classification: E32, E24, E52business cycle, Labor Market Search, monetary policy, Real Wage Rigidity, Unemployment

Idealism and Actualization. Saint-Just in Theory, Practice, and Exigency

Louis-Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767-1794) was a revolutionary, a statesman, and a political philosopher, yet it is largely only as a revolutionary that he is remembered. As a political person who occupied these three different but overlapping roles, Saint-Just is ideal as the subject and center of a study of actualization, the taking of political ideals into reality. Saint-Just’s political philosophy was that of an idealist, and yet he, by force of circumstance, ability, and audacity, had the opportunity in his short life to attempt to establish and put into practice his political ideals. In his work as a political person Saint-Just created templates for the understanding of the relationship between political theory and political action. Saint-Just’s political theory is examined in relation to his political action, using the concepts of ‘the natural’, ‘the civil’, ‘the social’ and ‘the political’, concepts which are central in Saint-Just’s political philosophy. Saint-Just’s formulations of these concepts, concepts which have also been central to the history of political philosophy, and his understanding of the relations between these concepts, helps to establish him as a political philosopher of some importance, as does the theory and practice approach to politics which his attempts demanded and which his political life demonstrated. In Saint-Just’s function as political philosopher the thesis finds the theoretical element of politics, which becomes redefined in its interaction with Saint-Just’s other functions as statesman and revolutionary, the latter two of which correspond roughly to practice and exigency. As a theorist who is also a statesman in a context of exigency, or revolution, Saint-Just’s political life is a constantly rearranged juxtaposition of theory, practice, and revolution, albeit one which never loses it essential ties to its philosophical base, even in the hours of greatest emergency. Such dedication to a philosophical base, one which refuses to dispense with political philosophy, demonstrates a new conception of political philosophy for the modern world, fills in elements of a theory of revolution as a phenomenon of both theory and action, and provides a contained case for examination of political philosophy and political action, questioning their disunity

Kontrastiivinen kielto : Konstruktioiden vaihtelu kielten sisällä ja niiden välillä

This dissertation examines contrastive negation. Contrastive negation is a cover term for constructions that combine a negated and affirmed element that refer to the same state of affairs (e.g. not today but tomorrow). There are many ways to express contrastive negation across languages and even within one language. In my dissertation, I ask what the functions of contrastive negation are, what forms it takes, and what explains the variation between these forms. I investigate these questions both within one language – English – and cross-linguistically. Previous research on contrastive negation has mostly resorted to introspectively constructed examples and its main focus has been on metalinguistic negation (e.g. not good but excellent). The main method used in this dissertation is corpus linguistics, i.e. the qualitative and quantitative study of electronically stored collections of naturally occurring texts. My aim has been to study contrastive negation as it actually appears in language use rather than focusing on artificially created ideal cases. I complement the corpus-linguistic perspective with interactional linguistics. In other words, I study how contrastive negation is used in casual conversation to create various socially relevant actions. The theoretical framework of the study is construction grammar, which starts with the assumption that language consists of constructions, i.e. pairings of form and function that language users learn from usage by using domain-general cognitive mechanisms. According to the corpus analysis, contrastive negation favours argumentative and interactive genres, such as newspaper editorials and conversation. There are gradient and sometimes quite subtle functional differences among the constructional schemas that are used to express contrastive negation in English newspaper discourse. In conversation, a difference emerges between English and Finnish constructional straregies: English favours asyndetic combinations of a negative and an affirmative clause while in Finnish, constructions that employ corrective conjunctions are used relatively frequently. In both languages, the forms that contrastive negation takes are adapted to the interactional context and function, especially to whether the construction is used reactively or not. In the last study of the dissertation, a comparison of 11 European languages reveals differences especially in the extent to which corrective conjunctions are used in the languages studied. The dissertation extends our understanding of contrastive negation. Instead of metalinguistic negation, which has dominated previous studies on the constructions, the central questions for this dissertation are whether the contrast is additive (not only Finland but also Sweden) or restrictive (not every day but merely at weekends), and whether the construction is used reactively or not.Tämä väitöskirja käsittelee kontrastiivista kieltoa. Kontrastiivisella kiellolla tarkoitetaan rakenteita, joissa yhdistyy samaa asiaintilaa kuvaava myönteinen ja kielteinen osa (esimerkiksi ei tänään vaan huomenna; ravistettuna, ei sekoitettuna). Kontrastiivisella kiellolla on monia ilmenemismuotoja eri kielissä ja myös saman kielen sisällä. Väitöskirjassani kysyn, mihin kontrastiivista kieltoa käytetään, mitä eri muotoja sillä on ja mikä niiden välistä vaihtelua selittää. Tutkin kontrastiivista kieltoa sekä yhdessä kielessä – englannissa – että kieltenvälisesti. Aiempi tutkimus kontrastiivisesta kiellosta on painottanut keksittyjä lause-esimerkkejä ja erityisesti niin sanottua metalingvististä kieltoa (esimerkiksi ei hyvä vaan loistava). Tämän tutkimuksen metodina on korpuslingvistiikka eli sähköisessä muodossa tallennettujen aitojen tekstien kokoelmien analysointi sekä laadullisesti että määrällisesti. Tarkoituksena on kuvata kontrastiivista kieltoa sellaisena kuin sitä käytetään idealisoitujen esimerkkien sijaan. Täydennän analyysia vuorovaikutuslingvistiikalla eli tutkin myös, miten kontrastiivista kieltoa käytetään arkikeskustelussa luomaan erilaisia sosiaalisesti merkityksellisiä toimintoja. Tutkimuksen teoreettisena viitekehyksenä käytän konstruktiokielioppia, jonka mukaan kieli koostuu muodon ja merkityksen yhteenliittymistä eli konstruktioista, joita kielen puhujat oppivat yleisten kognitiivisten mekanismien perusteella kielenkäytön pohjalta. Korpusanalyysin perusteella kontrastiivinen kielto on tyypillinen kielen piirre argumentatiivisissa ja vuorovaikutteisissa tekstilajeissa kuten pääkirjoituksissa ja arkikeskustelussa. Englanninkielisessä sanomalehtiaineistossa kontrastiivisen kiellon eri muotojen välillä on jatkumomaisia ja joskus hienovaraisiakin funktionaalisia eroja. Keskusteluaineistojen osalta englanti ja suomi eroavat toisistaan siinä, millaisia strategioita niiden puhujat käyttävät kontrastiivisen kiellon ilmaisemiseen: englannissa kontrastiivinen kielto ilmaistaan keskustelussa tyypillisesti kielteisen ja myönteisen lauseen asyndeettisenä rinnastuksena, kun taas suomessa myös korrektiivisten konjuntioiden (vaan ja kun) käyttö on suhteellisen tavallista. Kummassakin kielessä kontrastiivisen kiellon muoto motivoituu vuorovaikutustilanteesta ja -funktiosta, erityisesti siitä, käytetäänkö konstruktiota reaktiivisesti vai ei. Väitöskirjan viimeisessä osatutkimuksessa 11 kielen vertailu paljastaa kieltenävälisiä eroja erityisesti korrektiivisten konjunktioiden käyttöalassa. Väitöskirjan tulokset laajentavat kuvaa kontrastiivisesta kiellosta. Aiempaa tutkimusta hallinneen metalingvistisyyden sijaan keskeiseksi nousee kysymys siitä, onko kontrasti korvaava (ei tänään vaan huomenna), lisäävä (ei vain Suomi vaan myös Ruotsi) vai rajaava (ei joka päivä vaan ainoastaan viikonloppuisin), sekä siitä, onko konstruktion käyttö reaktiivista vai ei