Gossip in organisations: Contexts, consequences and controversies

This article examines the key themes surrounding gossip including its contexts, the various outcomes (positive and negative) of gossip as well as a selection of challenges and controversies. The challenges which are highlighted revolve around definitional issues, methodological approaches, and ethical considerations. Our analysis suggests that the characteristics and features of gossip lend itself to a process-oriented approach whereby the beginning and, particularly, end points of gossip are not always easily identified. Gossip about a subject or person can temporarily disappear only for it to re-surface at some later stage. In addition, questions pertaining to the effects of gossip and ethical-based arguments depend on the nature of the relationships within the gossip triad (gossiper, listener/respondent and target)

The unintended consequences of sex education: an ethnography of a development intervention in Latin America

This paper is an ethnography of a four-year, multi-disciplinary adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. An important goal of the intervention – and of the larger global field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health – is to create more open parent-to-teen communication. This paper analyzes the project's efforts to foster such communication and how social actors variously interpreted, responded to, and repurposed the intervention's language and practices. While the intervention emphasized the goal of ‘open communication,’ its participants more often used the term ‘confianza’ (trust). This norm was defined in ways that might – or might not – include revealing information about sexual activity. Questioning public health assumptions about parent–teen communication on sex, in and of itself, is key to healthy sexual behavior, the paper explores a pragmatics of communication on sex that includes silence, implied expectations, gendered conflicts, and temporally delayed knowledge.Cuencavolumen 21, número

Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Corruption in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

This paper aims to explore the multifaceted meaning, logic, and morality of informal transactions in order to better understand the social context that informs the meaning of corruption and bribery in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. It will be argued that the informal transactions in Uzbek society reflect different cultural and functional meanings from those in most of the Western world, and hence transactions that from a Western-centric perspective would be labelled as bribes can be morally accepted transactions in the Uzbek cultural context. If this is true, there may be reasons to re-evaluate the relevance of the Western-centric interpretations of corruption in the context of Uzbekistan, and possibly other Central Asian countries. These issues will be investigated with reference to observations and informal interviews from post-Soviet Uzbekistan. This study is based on three periods of ethnographic field research between 2009 and 2012 in the Ferghana Province of Uzbekistan. It draws on concepts of ‘living law’ and legal pluralism to provide a theoretical framework

Knowledge actors and the construction of new governing panoramas:The case of the European Commission’s DG Education and Culture

RESUMO: Este artigo aborda o tema da governança da educação na Europa. Esse espaço da política tem sido dominado por grandes interesses e organizações transnacionais, entre as quais se destacam a Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Econômico (OCDE) e a Comissão Europeia (CE). Este artigo procura explorar e explicar quais são os efeitos constitutivos que as práticas sistemáticas de 'medição' e de estandardização têm na intensificação da convergência entre a Direção-Geral de Educação e Cultura da CE e a OCDE, a qual, por meio do PISA e de outros testes internacionais, tornou-se um ator influente na política educativa em uma escala global. O artigo pretende identificar os feitos do 'governo pelos números' nas interdependências criadas entre as duas organizações internacionais

Gendered representations in Hawai‘i’s anti-GMO activism

The aim of this article is to analyse some of the representations of intersectional gender that materialise in activism against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It uses the case of Hawai‘i as a key node in global transgenic seed production and hotspot for food, land and farming controversies. Based on ethnographic work conducted since 2012, the article suggests some of the ways that gender is represented within movements against GMOs by analysing activist media representations. The article shows how gender, understood intersectionally, informs possibilities for movement-identification, exploring how themes of motherhood, warrior masculinities and sexualised femininities are represented within these movements. The article suggests that some activist representations of gender invoke what could be considered as normative framings of gender similar to those seen in other environmental, food and anti-GMO movements. It is suggested that these gendered representations may influence and limit how different subjects engage with Hawai'i anti-GMO movements. At the same time, contextual, intersectional readings demonstrate the complex histories behind what appear to be gender normative activist representations. Taken together, this emphasis on relative norms of femininities and masculinities may provide anti-GMO organising with familiar social frames that counterbalance otherwise threatening campaigns against (agri)business in the settler state. Understood within these histories, the work that gender does within anti-GMO organising may offer generative examples for thinking through the relationships between gendered representations and situated, indigenous-centred, food and land-based resistances

ANALISIS RASIO KEUANGAN DALAM MEMPREDIKSI PERUBAHAN LABA PADA PERUSAHAAN MANUFAKTUR YANG TERDAFTAR DI BURSA EFEK INDONESIA

Financial ratio serves to identify the strength and weakness of the finance of a company. Financial ratio allows investors to assess the financial state and operational outcome of the company at present and in the past, as well as serves as a guideline for the investors in making decisions about the investments. The information of financial ratio with regards to the investors� interest is in the form of profit information. Profit information is not merely inferred from the profit itself but also from the financial ratio that related with the profit that it may provide prediction of the profit in the future. In addition, as a dependent variable in this research, earning changes use net profit change per future share. In this research, the sample consists of as many as 58 companies during a five-year period for observation (2005-2009). The sample is manufacturing companies that fulfill several criteria of sample selection by using the purposive sampling method. The objective of this research is the empirical evidence on the influence of financial ratios in predicting earning changes in manufacturing companies. The result of this research shows that there are seven variables that are able to predict earning changes significantly, that is, Current Ratio (CR), Gross Profit Margin (GPM), Operating Profit Margin (OPM), Return on Equity (ROE), Ratio Inventory Turn Over (ITO), Basic Earning Power (BEP), and Debt Ratio (DR). Three variables were proved not able to predict earning changes significantly, that is, Net Income to Sales (NIS), Total Asset Turn Over (TATO), and Sales to Current Liabilities (SCL). Current Ratio (CR), Gross Profit Margin (GPM), Operating Profit Margin (OPM), Net Income to Sales (NIS), Return on Equity (ROE), Ratio Inventory Turn Over (ITO), Total Asset Turn Over (TATO), Sales to Current Liabilities (SCL), Basic Earning Power (BEP), and Debt Ratio (DR) simultaneously and significantly affect profit change. The influence of those ten variables to profit change was as much as 19.5%

Pengaruh Suku Bunga Kredit, Inflasi, Dan Nilai Tukar Terhadap Jenis Penyaluran Kredit Bank Umum Di Indonesia

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pengaruh suku bunga kredit, inflasi, dan nilai tukar terhadap jenis penyaluran kredit Bank Umum di Indonesia. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif. Metode yang digunakan adalah Analisis Regresi Linier Berganda. Data diperoleh merupakan data sekunder yang diterbitkan oleh Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS) berupa suku bunga kredit, serta Bank Indonesia (BI) berupa tingkat inflasi, nilai tukar, dan ketiga jenis penyaluran kredit. Adapun jenis penyaluran kredit yang dimaksud adalah kredit konsumsi, kredit investasi, dan kredit modal kerja. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa suku bunga kredit berpengaruh negatif dan signifikan terhadap ketiga jenis penyaluran kredit. Sedangkan, inflasi berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap ketiga jenis penyaluran kredit, namun pengaruh yang dihasilkan antara inflasi dan penyaluran kredit tidak sesuai dengan teori dan dugaan peneliti. Sama halnya dengan inflasi, nilai tukar menghasilkan pengaruh yang tidak sesuai dengan teori dan dugaan peneliti. Nilai Tukar berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap kredit investasi, serta nilai tukar tidak berpengaruh signifikan terhadap kredit konsumsi dan kredit modal kerj