Corporate responsibility and place leadership in rural digitalization: the case of Hidden Champions

We examine the role of Hidden Champions in rural areas in advancing regional digitalization through corporate local and regional responsibility and place leadership. Endowed with abundant internal resources and high innovative capacity, these global niche market leaders face regional resource constraints, concerning digital infrastructure and workforce with digital capabilities. 57 semi-structured interviews with firm representatives and regional actors in rural Germany are analyzed. We show that these enterprises strategically use measures of corporate local and regional responsibility and exert place leadership to develop digitalization-related assets in their rural regions. These initiatives are operated through modes of both inclusive and exclusive agency and benefit. We find that the motives for these actions are grounded in a perceived lack of swiftness and capacity of public actors, but also entail emotional attachment to the region, particularly for family businesses. Our findings have implications for regional policymakers, such as targeting greater alignment of regional and corporate development goals. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Hidden Champions and their integration in rural regional innovation systems: Insights from Germany

This article studies the integration of Hidden Champions - little-known highly innovative global market leaders - in rural regional innovation systems (RIS) in Germany. These firms are analyzed in relation to their integration into a RIS framework, which differentiates two subsystems: knowledge generation and diffusion, and knowledge application and exploitation. The relevance of firm-internal and firm-external regional influencing factors on rural RIS integration is examined. The article proposes that Hidden Champions are weakly integrated in RIS due to their international sales focus and high technological specialization. To test this premise, 57 expert interviews with Hidden Champions and regional actors were conducted. It was found that key influences for RIS integration of this firm type are ownership structure, firm size, organizational status, location economies, and urbanization economies. Family businesses are on average more integrated than other firm types, but vary significantly in their integration

Corporate culture: an investigation into the operationalisation of the concept and into divergences between management and staff

Studies on corporate culture are mostly limited to samples drawn from management, and the integrative view of corporate culture as something unique within an organisation still dominates in the literature. Such a unitary stance bears the risk that cultural divergences in corporations remain undetected, thereby limiting the value of research on corporate culture. A further aspect found in the literature is the complexity and variety ascribed to corporate culture, which exacerbates practical implementation of the concept. The operationalisation of the cultural concept is still a prevalent problem not yet completely resolved. This research addresses these two concerns. The researcher conducted this research at Post CH Ltd. The study incorporated the design and implementation of a tailored survey, based on cultural dimensions from the literature, items from Swiss Post’s employee survey, and data from semi-structured qualitative interviews with members of top management. The survey involved employees of Post CH Ltd from all hierarchical levels, selected by proportionate stratified random sampling. The two thirds of the questionnaire recipients who responded could also comment on an optional open question. The researcher then analysed the qualitative and quantitative data in order to discover the degree of\ud alignment on corporate culture. Finally, recommendations were elaborated on how to mitigate the explored divergences between management and employees. This research provides contributions in two distinct areas: first, it demonstrates that the perception of a unitary corporate culture is not always tenable. The researcher found distinctive and statistically significant divergences in corporate culture, as staff in line management positions are considerably more positive in their perception of corporate culture compared to employees without management responsibilities. Using content analysis, the researcher further discovered divergences in the perception of corporate culture between top management and employees. Second, it demonstrated the successful operationalisation of corporate culture research into practical application, by offering a thorough, concrete, specific, and tailored approach, contributing to a more practitioner friendly usage of the concept of corporate culture. The methods used here can be applied to other organisations in a similar way. Keywords: Corporate culture; organisational culture; cultural divergences; cultural fit; organisational change; organisational performance; Swiss Post; Post CH Ltd

Local time stepping on high performance computing architectures: mitigating CFL bottlenecks for large-scale wave propagation

Modeling problems that require the simulation of hyperbolic PDEs (wave equations) on large heterogeneous domains have potentially many bottlenecks. We attack this problem through two techniques: the massively parallel capabilities of graphics processors (GPUs) and local time stepping (LTS) to mitigate any CFL bottlenecks on a multiscale mesh. Many modern supercomputing centers are installing GPUs due to their high performance, and extending existing seismic wave-propagation software to use GPUs is vitally important to give application scientists the highest possible performance. In addition to this architectural optimization, LTS schemes avoid performance losses in meshes with localized areas of refinement. Coupled with the GPU performance optimizations, the derivation and implementation of an Newmark LTS scheme enables next-generation performance for real-world applications. Included in this implementation is work addressing the load-balancing problem inherent to multi-level LTS schemes, enabling scalability to hundreds and thousands of CPUs and GPUs. These GPU, LTS, and scaling optimizations accelerate the performance of existing applications by a factor of 30 or more, and enable future modeling scenarios previously made unfeasible by the cost of standard explicit time-stepping schemes

Le vécu de l'infertilité chez les Luo : entre tradition, modernité et réalité médicale

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Aushandlungen bei Kindeswohlgefährdungen:Entscheidungsrationalitäten fachlich-öffentlicher Intervention

Diese qualitativ-psychologische Untersuchung befasst sich mit Entscheidungsrationalitäten verantwortlicher Personen, die bei Kindeswohlgefährdungen tätig und in solchen Fällen mit verschiedenen Aufgaben der Klärung und Intervention befasst sind. Fachlich-öffentliche Intervention bei Kindeswohlgefährdungen stellt sich keineswegs als eine nach rationalen Kriterien steuer- und daher voraussagbare institutionell-administrative Routine dar. Die konkrete Ausgestaltung fachlicher Interventionen kann vielmehr als Ergebnis eines komplexen, einzelfallbezogenen Aushandlungsprozesses verstanden werden, bei dem neben dem jeweiligen Kindeswohl vielfältige weitere Ziele und Interessen der beteiligten Akteure von Belang sein können. Datenquellen sind u.a. vertrauliche Hintergrundgespräche, narrative Interviews und teilnehmende Beobachtungen mit Experten aus den Handlungsfeldern Jugendhilfe, Justiz, Polizei und Medizin