Contradictions in social enterprise: do they draw in straight lines or circles?

This paper provides a critical perspective on the discourse surrounding the concept of social enterprise. The paper shifts the lens away from numbers to consider how actors see themselves as social enterprises. The authors make sense of the foundations upon which the concept of social enterprise and entrepreneurship is ‘drawn’ – quite literally – by considering linear models and diagrams that analyse social enterprise on a continuum between non-profit (mission) and profit (market) orientation. A great deal has been made of the success and growth of social enterprise. The imagery in the literature reflects an emphasis on growth resulting from ‘the rising tide of commercialisation of non-profit organisations’ (Dees, 1998) with the result that the CBI now includes over 50,000 organisations in a social enterprise sector (SBS, 2005). Despite reports of rapid growth, there is awareness that ‘take-up of social enterprise model … is patchy and fails to reflect the enthusiasm with which it is discussed’ (Stevenson in Westall &amp; Chalkley 2007). We ask why? A methodological approach involving visual drawings by actors reveals stories and sensemaking experiences of social enterprises. Open conversations enabled the researchers to gain deep insights that would not have been as insightful through a quantitative approach. The key findings suggest: Firstly, participants report tensions when pursuing social and economic goals simultaneously. Secondly, whilst some welcome opportunities that are emerging, others perceive substantive threats to the third sector. Thirdly, Social enterprise emerges as a diverse and heterogeneous movement located at the boundaries of public, private and voluntary sectors. At each boundary, different constitutional forms and practices are seen. In conclusion, it is argued that the linear perspective itself gives the impression that there is a ‘patchy’ take up of social enterprise. A heterogeneous perspective reveals that theory and policy development is patchy, rather than social enterprise practices. The unique contribution this research paper offers is within the depth of enquiry and insight into the actual practices provided from those within the field. The critical perspective is taken from the literature and discussed in the settings of the actors in the field which provides practitioners, business support agencies and academics with a different level of empirical investigation that captures an originality and narrative that has barely been explored before.</p

Seeing social enterprise through the theoretical conceptualisation of ethical capital

Objectives: Current conceptualisations of social enterprise fail to fully satisfy an understanding of the movement. A focus on the economic implies a business model where deep tensions lie. A focus on social capital offers a different frame of reference, yet both these conceptualisations fail to fully identify the phenomena that is social enterprise. The objective of this paper seeks to fill that gap. Ethical capital is offered here as the missing conceptualisation in the field of social enterprise. Prior work: Pearce (2003) describes social enterprises as part of the third system, closer to the first system (private business), than the second system (public provision), yet primarily social and secondly a business. Social Enterprises are described as trading organisations in a market (Pearce 2003). A focus and operationalisation for social enterprises to be ‘business-like’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ is well documented (Leadbeater 1997; Dees 1998; Nicholls 2006b). Approach: Yet, if as part of the third sector, social enterprises are as Dart (2004) suggests; ‘blurring the boundaries between non-profit and profit’, but what blurs? What is compromised? What exactly is lost (or gained)? What challenges are there for social enterprises? And is a managerialist ideology taking precedence over the social? This paper provides a conceptual paper that seeks to outline the arguments on the table and develop an ethical capital conceptualisation of social enterprise. Results: This paper very much aims at starting the process of intellectual debate about the notion of ethical capital in social enterprises. The conclusions of this paper outline further research questions that need to be addressed in order to fully develop this concept. Implications: The current ideology of the neo-classical economic paradigm it is argued in the paper pursues interests towards the self and towards the erosion of the moral basis of association. The outcome leaves society with a problem of low ethical virtue - the implications of this paper are that social enterprises maximise ethical virtue beyond any other form of organisation and as such hold great value beyond their missions and values. Value: This paper offers great value in the understanding of social enterprise through fresh insight into the conceptualisation. A critical perspective to the current literature is taken and discussed but though the introduction of ethical capital this paper takes our understanding of the value of the sector into another light, providing practitioners, business support agencies and academics alike with a different level of conceptualisation that has not been explored before.</p

Population inversion in optically pumped asymmetric quantum well terahertz lasers

Intersubband carrier lifetimes and population ratios are calculated for three- and four-level optically pumped terahertz laser structures. Laser operation is based on intersubband transitions between the conduction band states of asymmetric GaAs-Ga(1 – x)Al(x)As quantum wells. It is shown that the carrier lifetimes in three-level systems fulfill the necessary conditions for stimulated emission only at temperatures below 200 K. The addition of a fourth level, however, enables fast depopulation of the lower laser level by resonant longitudinal optical phonon emission and thus offers potential for room temperature laser operation. © 1997 American Institute of Physics

Pulsar Populations in the Galaxy and Magellanic Clouds

Pulsars are great tools for studying the Universe. From energetics to radio emission, many of the properties of pulsars can be used to understand other physical phenomena occurring throughout the Universe today. This dissertation examines pulsars and their properties through the use of computer simulations, describes the basic pulsar search procedure, and presents the results of a search for millisecond pulsars (MSPs) and fast radio transients in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).;Using Monte Carlo simulations, a working model of normal pulsars that accurately represents the observed population was created. These simulations allow for changes to be made to the initial spin period, luminosity, braking index, and magnetic field distributions (among others), and the resulting model can be compared to the observed sample of pulsars. These simulations have shown that the luminosity must have some dependence on the spin period and that the braking index has very little effect on the overall pulsar population. Also, it was found to be not possible to produce a self-consistent model of the pulsar population that includes magnetic axis alignment in any of the currently known spin-down laws.;A practical use of these models is the prediction of the results of future pulsar surveys. The model populations can be used to determine the number of pulsars that could be found in a similar survey done with a real telescope. For the purposes of this dissertation, the pulsar population of both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) were simulated and then searched for pulsars. After accounting for the low escape velocities of both Clouds, the estimated birthrate of pulsars in either Cloud is 0.5--1.0 pulsars per century, and the estimated numbers of normal pulsars are (1.79 +/- 0.20) x 104 and (1.09 +/- 0.16) x 10 4 for the LMC and SMC, respectively. For the MSP populations, upper limits of 15,000 and 23,000 for the LMC and SMC were obtained. The SMC simulations predicted that up to three MSPs could be detected in a new, high-resolution survey performed at the Parkes Telescope in Parkes, Australia.;The pulsar search procedure is mostly computerized and is very data intensive. Fourier transforms are utilized in the search for periodic signals, and matched filtering is used to search for single bursts of radio emission. Acceleration searches attempt to find pulsars that are locked in binary orbits with other stars in which the pulsars\u27 accelerations significantly affect the timing of the signals that telescopes on the Earth detect. These search techniques were applied to a survey for pulsars in the SMC that was executed at the Parkes Telescope in Parkes, Australia. This survey has, to date, redetected three known pulsars, discovered three potential MSP candidates, and placed an upper limit of 15 bursting sources in the SMC. The results of this survey have now led to a similar survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud that is currently in progress

Intra-individual variation in children\u27s physical activity patterns: Implications for measurement

Children\u27s physical activity (PA) patterns change form day to day. This intra-individual variability affects precision when measuring key physical activity and sedentary behavior variables. This paper discusses strategies to reduce the random error associated with intra-individual variability and demonstrates the implications for assessing PA when varying number of days are sampled. Self-reported data collected on two hundred and ninety eight 13- to 14-year-olds were used to compare estimates of PA and sedentary behaviour derived from between 1 and 7 days of recall data. Large intra-individual coefficients of variation were calculated for physical activity level (14.5%), moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (83.4%), screen time (60.8%) and sleep (12.2%). While the magnitude of error associated with estimating means decreased as more days were sampled, the paper notes that depending on the nature of the research question being asked, fewer days may yield sufficiently precise estimates. Therefore, researchers should conduct power analyses based on estimated inter- and intra-individual variability and sample size to determine how many days to sample when assessing children\u27s PA patterns

An optimised algorithm for ionized impurity scattering in Monte Carlo simulations

We present a new optimised model of Brookes-Herring ionized impurity scattering for use in Monte Carlo simulations of semiconductors. When implemented, it greatly decreases the execution time needed for simulations (typically by a factor of the order of 100), and also properly incorporates the great proportion of small angle scatterings that are neglected in the standard algorithm. It achieves this performance by using an anisotropic choice of scattering angle which accurately mimics the true angular distribution of ionized impurity scattering.Comment: 5 page

Increasing vertical mixing to reduce Southern Ocean deep convection in NEMO3.4

Most CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5) models unrealistically form Antarctic Bottom Water by open ocean deep convection in the Weddell and Ross seas. To identify the mechanisms triggering Southern Ocean deep convection in models, we perform sensitivity experiments on the ocean model NEMO3.4 forced by prescribed atmospheric fluxes. We vary the vertical velocity scale of the Langmuir turbulence, the fraction of turbulent kinetic energy transferred below the mixed layer, and the background diffusivity and run short simulations from 1980. All experiments exhibit deep convection in the Riiser-Larsen Sea in 1987; the origin is a positive sea ice anomaly in 1985, causing a shallow anomaly in mixed layer depth, hence anomalously warm surface waters and subsequent polynya opening. Modifying the vertical mixing impacts both the climatological state and the associated surface anomalies. The experiments with enhanced mixing exhibit colder surface waters and reduced deep convection. The experiments with decreased mixing give warmer surface waters, open larger polynyas causing more saline surface waters and have deep convection across the Weddell Sea until the simulations end. Extended experiments reveal an increase in the Drake Passage transport of 4 Sv each year deep convection occurs, leading to an unrealistically large transport at the end of the simulation. North Atlantic deep convection is not significantly affected by the changes in mixing parameters. As new climate model overflow parameterisations are developed to form Antarctic Bottom Water more realistically, we argue that models would benefit from stopping Southern Ocean deep convection, for example by increasing their vertical mixing

Eight New Radio Pulsars in the Large Magellanic Cloud

We present the discovery of eight new radio pulsars located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Five of these pulsars were found from reprocessing the Parkes Multibeam Survey of the Magellanic Clouds, while the remaining three were from an ongoing new survey at Parkes with a high-resolution data acquisition system. It is possible that these pulsars were missed in the earlier processing due to radio frequency interference, visual judgment or the large number of candidates that must be analysed. One of these new pulsars has a dispersion measure of 273 pc cm−3, almost twice the highest previously known value, making it possibly the most distant LMC pulsar. In addition, we present the null result of a radio pulse search of an X-ray point source located in SNR J0047.2−7308 in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Although no millisecond pulsars have been found, these discoveries have increased the known rotation-powered pulsar population in the LMC by more than 50 per cent. Using the current sample of LMC pulsars, we used a Bayesian analysis to constrain the number of potentially observable pulsars in the LMC to within a 95 per cent credible interval of 57 000+70000−30000. The new survey at Parkes is ∼20 per cent complete, and it is expected to yield at most six millisecond pulsars in the LMC and SMC. Although it is very sensitive to short period pulsars, this new survey provides only a marginal increase in sensitivity to long periods. The limiting luminosity for this survey is 125 mJy kpc2 for the LMC which covers the upper 10 per cent of all known radio pulsars. The luminosity function for normal pulsars in the LMC is consistent with their counterparts in the Galactic disc. The maximum 1400 MHz radio luminosity for LMC pulsars is ∼1000 mJy kpc2

New limits on the population of normal and millisecond pulsars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds

We model the potentially observable populations of normal and millisecond radio pulsars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) where the known population currently stands at 19 normal radio pulsars. Taking into account the detection thresholds of previous surveys, and assuming optimal period and luminosity distributions based on studies of Galactic pulsars, we estimate there are (1.79 +/- 0.20) x 10^4 and (1.09 +/- 0.16) x 10^4 normal pulsars in the LMC and SMC respectively. When we attempt to correct for beaming effects, and the fraction of high-velocity pulsars which escape the clouds, we estimate birth rates in both the LMC and SMC to be comparable and in the range 0.5--1 pulsar per century. Although higher than estimates for the rate of core-collapse supernovae in the clouds, these pulsar birth rates are consistent with historical supernova observations in the past 300 yr. A substantial population of active radio pulsars (of order a few hundred thousand) have escaped the LMC and SMC and populate the local intergalactic medium. For the millisecond pulsar (MSP) population, the lack of any detections from current surveys leads to respective upper limits (at the 95% confidence level) of 15,000 for the LMC and 23,000 for the SMC. Several MSPs could be detected by a currently ongoing survey of the SMC with improved time and frequency resolution using the Parkes multibeam system. Giant-pulse emitting neutron stars could also be seen by this survey.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter