How Business Values Determine Lack Of Innovation & Petty Entrepreneurship: The Case Of Turkey

The role of innovation in capitalist development has long been identified. For late industrializing countries, it is indispensable for achieving sustained economic growth. Turkey, as a late industrializer, has also faced serious difficulties in this regard. This paper demonstrates the significance of cultural values internalized by individuals for innovation and business attitudes. In a structure-agency setting, it argues that not only regulation through institutions and social norms but also the way economic agents comprehend modern values determine the scope of business attitude that permeates economy and society. In the Turkish context, the blend of modern (rationalistic) values with traditional ones creates a dilemma between social commitment and blatant opportunism, in time leading to the dominance of short-term profit making in the economy at the expense of societal rules and norms. By conducting linear regression analyses over a sample of 150 executive, middle and owner managers, the article demonstrates how cultural values affect innovativeness. In so doing, it unveils the relations between personality traits underlying the adoption of innovations and different cultural value characteristics

Public communication by research institutes compared across countries and sciences: building capacity for engagement or competing for visibility?

Leading academic institutions, governments, and funders of research across the world have spent the last few decades fretting publicly about the need for scientists and research organisations to engage more widely with the public and be open about their research. While a global literature asserts that public communication has changed from a virtue to a duty for scientists in many countries and disciplines, our knowledge about what research institutions are doing and what factors drive their 'going public' is very limited. Here we present the first cross-national study of N = 2,030 research institutes within universities and large scientific organisations in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We find that institutes embrace communication with non-peers and do so through a variety of public events and traditional news media-less so through new media channels-and we find variation across countries and sciences, yet these are less evident than we expected. Country and disciplinary cultures contribute to the level of this communication, as do the resources that institutes make available for the effort; institutes with professionalised staff show higher activity online. Future research should examine whether a real change in the organisational culture is happening or whether this activity and resource allocation is merely a means to increase institutional visibility

An analysis of material consumption culture in the Muslim world

In this chapter, we examine the notion of material consumption culture in Islamic societies. We differentiate between institutionalised religion and religion as culture. We contest the Orientalist portrayal of Islam as a fanatic ideology opposed to Western Modernity’s features of secularism, individualism, and pluralism. With reference to the Qur’anic text, we discuss that such qualities are embedded with Islam. We do not interpret the Qur’an from a theological perspective; rather, we seek to demonstrate the possibilities of its multiple interpretations. We argue that, in their everyday life consumption practices, Muslims (re)interpret religious guidelines in different ways and refer to Islam, as a transcendental set of guidelines, to make better sense of their cultural practices in different ways. We summarise our discussion by highlighting the importance of analysing the culture of consumption from the lens of insiders and offer directions for future research

Text analysis: an introductory manifesto

Selecting the articles for these volumes of SAGE benchmarks on ‘text analysis’ was no easy task. How to determine the scope of the selection? One could go with a very limited definition of text, such as a canon of official documents or a very broad notion, like ‘cultural artefacts’, representing any meaningful symbol system. These definitions of text resonate with different approaches to text: decoding and deconstruction. The canon selection suggests that the meaning of a text is closed, contained in the work with the sole purpose to transmit a message from author to reader. Within a ‘transfer-conduit’ perspective (see Reddy, 1993), the aim of text analysis is to provide expert tools such as literary criticism, philology, or content analysis to decode the texts which would otherwise be inaccessible for a simple reader; text analysis aims to observe and discover the attitudes, behaviours, concerns, motivations and culture of the text producer from an expert point of view. According to the open definition on the other hand, the meaning of any artefact, including text, is wide open, the message is not there to discover and to deconstruct during the reading process. Recovering the meaning is not an exoteric activity (for experts and the educated), but an esoteric performance (immersive and emergent). But, reading is an interpretive activity that can only be performed by those who are embedded into the symbolic world of the text. All action, if we push the notion, even nature, is a “text” to be read, where signs are intelligently designed to reveal knowledge and guide the way to truth. The purpose of text analysis is thus not the passive reading of the author’s world but the entry into a reflexive dialogue between the reader-analyst and the text

Bridging qualitative and quantitative methods for classifying policy actors into policy discourse communities: thematic analysis and formal concept analysis approaches

Policy decision process is usually depicted as a neutral and technical process in which problem solving capacity of a policy decision determines the validity of its effectiveness. However, socio-political space is fragmented and policy making process reflects the conflicts between different socio-political actors. Empirical detection of policy networks is a problematic issue since world views reflecting policy beliefs can best be elicited in unstructured narrative forms which do not easily lend themselves to a systematic and objective classification of the narrating actors. Thus, the data for such research is usually collected through structured interviews which provide a solid basis for quantitative classification techniques such as cluster analysis. However, structured interviews are prone to imposing researcher's perspective to the data rather than reflecting the world views of the policy actors. The aim of this paper is to offer a systematic way of classifying policy actors into policy communities according to the data collected through unstructured policy narratives. For this purpose the paper proposes a method that bridges qualitative thematic analysis with quantitative formal concept analysis.discourse analysis; formal concept analysis; policy networks; thematic analysis; policy decisions; decision making; classification; policy actors; policy communities.

The sacred and the profane in Islamic consumption

This paper examines the concept of material consumption culture in the Moslem world. It differentiates between institutionalized religion and religion as culture, contests the portrayal of Islam as a dogmatic ideological system, and concludes that in their profane consumption practices, Moslems interpret the sacred (Islamic guidelines) in multiple ways

Demystifying consumption culture in Islamic societies

In this conceptual paper, we examine the notion of consumption culture in Islamic societies. We expand on 'multiple Islams' and differentiate between institutionalised religion and religion as culture. We argue that like every religion, Islam has the potential to be used as an ideological tool to justify certain political objectives. This use of Islam had long encouraged its portrayal as a fanatic and hardcore legitimisation of oppressive regimes. This 'Orientalist' view depicted Islam as the absolute 'Other' of everything such as secularism, democracy and freedom Western values stood for. The aim of this paper is to contest the portrayal of Islam as a political system and demonstrate that in its cultural form religious symbols of Islam are in a constant interpretation process within everyday life activities. We argue that Islam as a religion is a transcendental activity such as art and philosophy that endows the individual with a noumenal consciousness tool for making sense of the phenomenal world of the everyday activities. This tool is a loosely structured symbols system that allows for a constant reinterpretation of everyday activities

Emancipatory interpretive consumer research: “the road less travelled by” in islamic societies

Long before consumption as an everyday life cultural practice interested Western scholars in the 20th century (Belk, 1995), consumption had been an important part of Islamic scholarship since the 7th century (Jafari and Süerdem, forthcoming). Yet, forming almost one fifth of the world population, contemporary Muslim societies lag behind the rest of the world (particularly the West) in terms of knowledge production in the realm of consumer behaviour research in general and interpretive consumer research in particular. Addressing this knowledge gap in the field, in this paper we examine the potential reasons for this underrepresentation and deem inductive interpretive methods (such as hermeneutics and semiotics) most emancipatory and progressive means of theorisation of consumption in Muslim communities. As the core of our discussion, we argue that consumption in Islamic societies suffers from a lack of theorisation. The majority of existing literature on consumption in Islamic societies is based on the premises of reductionist conventional theories that make general assumptions about Islamic ideation with little attention and relevance to Muslims’ daily life practices. Such conventional theories – that come from two camps outside and inside of the Muslim world – make superficial analogies between Western and Islamic principles. The former is epitomised in Weber’s (1958, 1965) ‘trivial analysis’ (Turner, 1974; Husain, 2004) of Islam, economy and society. Weber’s legacy lies in his theorisation of value systems. For him, whilst protestant ethics is driven by value-based rationality, Muslims’ value systems are based on militant (jihad) instrumental-rationality (short term self-interest and pillaging) and emotional (martyrdom) motivations. Therefore, neither capital accumulation is possible nor worldly pleasures are pursued. As a result, Muslims essentially wash their hands off the worldly blessings. The latter stream of theories, generated from within the Muslim world, also adopts a reductionist approach. Consumption in this perspective is largely analysed within the rigid framework of Halal (lawful) and Haram (unlawful), the Mustahabb (favoured) and Makruh (disliked) (Jafari and Süerdem, forthcoming). Such dichotomous categorisations – which legitimise some deeds and demonise others – prevail in the Islamic discourse as Muslim scholars barely trespass these rigid boundaries to study consumption from other possible angles (e.g., social, cultural, aesthetic). Typically, trenched in an ideologised Islam, consumption culture is viewed as the essence of Western capitalism (and, of course, its subsequent Modernity) which seeks to impose its value systems (socio-cultural and economic) on Islamic societies. In our discussion, we critique these two perspectives for their incapability of extending our knowledge of everyday life consumption practices within Muslim societies. Additionally, contextualising consumer research within a philosophical and epistemological system, we consider ‘sacralisation of Islamic philosophy’ (Sanei Darrehbidi, 1998) a deterrent force before the development and application of new research methods that would break away from universalism and instead focus on localism. Since individual Muslims negotiate multiple value systems in their everyday life consumption practices and values exist in semiotic systems, we call scholars to adopt interpretive methods (such as semiotics and hermeneutics) as effective methods to study consumption in Islamic societies

Persistence of informal networks and liberal peace-building: evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Informal networks persist after conflict and undermine liberal peace-building. While these adverse effects are well-known, how informal networks survive beyond conflict is less understood. Scholars explain informal networks’ persistence by their stability and cohesion, attributed to solidarity of ascriptive bonds such as ethnic ties. In these accounts, networks are approached as actors and not as relational structures. We address this gap in the peace-building scholarship and conduct a longitudinal study of relations within an informal network in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing on the political approach to networks, and applying Social Network Analysis, we investigate actors’ relational power and reveal how network actors use their connections to create strategic coalitions and opportunistic collaborations enabling them to exploit different stages of the peace-building process. We demonstrate that unequal distribution of relational power creates vested interests in sustaining the network and in seeking access to it, and how dynamic reconstitution of relational power within the network ensures continuity of network action from war to peace. From a policy perspective, this structural account of informal network persistence suggests a need for a better understanding of the dynamics among co-ethnics within an informal network that allows network members to subvert efforts to counter informality and undermines post-conflict institution-building