'I just want a job': the untold stories of entrepreneurship

In this chapter, we explore the untold stories of Spanish and Irish necessity entrepreneurs to better understand the process of becoming an entrepreneur. Working with narratives, media articles, and policy documents, we illustrate how necessity entrepreneurs do not recognize themselves in the institutionalized entrepreneur narrative as empowered, creative and independent individuals. It is necessity, not opportunity that is pushing, not pulling, them to become entrepreneurial. The process is experienced as more fragmented than official narratives outline. In exposing these untold stories, the chapter expands our understanding of entrepreneurship, presenting a more nuanced view of both entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial process

Responding To Stigmatization: How to resist and overcome the stigma of unemployment

Organization research on stigma has mostly focused on the stigmatized, limiting the scope for exploring what is possible and lacking recognition of the structural conditions and unequal power relations that create and sustain stigma. Consequently, it overlooks how actors can organize to resist and potentially overcome stigmatization altogether. Addressing this question empirically, we studied the long-term unemployed in Spain using a longitudinal qualitative research design. We develop a typology of responses to stigmatization – getting stuck, getting by, getting out, getting back at and getting organized – that advances our understanding of stigma in several ways. First, our typology captures stigma as a multilevel phenomenon. Second, it makes explicit that stigma can only be understood in relation to its socio-historical contexts and unequal relations of power. Third, it captures how resisting stigma needs to be a collective enterprise and advances the importance of organizing to both challenge stigmatization and explore alternatives

Responding to stigmatization: how to resist and overcome the stigma of unemployment

Organization research on stigma has mostly focused on the stigmatized, limiting the scope for exploring what is possible and lacking recognition of the structural conditions and unequal power relations that create and sustain stigma. Consequently, it overlooks how actors can organize to resist and potentially overcome stigmatization altogether. Addressing this question empirically, we studied the long-term unemployed in Spain using a longitudinal qualitative research design. We develop a typology of responses to stigmatization – getting stuck, getting by, getting out, getting back at and getting organized – that advances our understanding of stigma in several ways. First, our typology captures stigma as a multilevel phenomenon. Second, it makes explicit that stigma can only be understood in relation to its socio-historical contexts and unequal relations of power. Third, it captures how resisting stigma needs to be a collective enterprise and advances the importance of organizing to both challenge stigmatization and explore alternatives

Performing activism: How female activists develop dialogical organising practices to fight precarity

Ponencia presentada en 16th Organisation Studies Workshop Dialogic organising: Affirming public engagement for hope and solidarity. 19-21 May 2022 Chania, Greece.Activism entails provoking, opening and/or maintaining ongoing dialogues to enable those in unstable, unequal or precarious conditions to become visible and have a voice. However, a generative engagement with activism requires not only the ability to speak, occupy, and perform in public spaces but also to open them up to allow for alternative perspectives and conditions to emerge. We look at female activism through the lenses of liminality and performativity to understand how a group of Spanish female activists develop dialogic organising practices when fighting against precarity. We use a qualitative study, conducted over nine years, focusing on the experiences of participants of two activist collectives in Seville, southern Spain, that emerged as a consequence of the Great Recession. Our female activists experienced a journey —from becoming part of anti-precarity collectives and performing activism to disengaging from it, reminiscent of the liminal stages of separation, limen and aggregation. The analysis of observations, ethnographic accounts, videos, and interviews illustrates how, to perform in liminal spaces, the activists crafted ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage’ spaces during their fight against precarity. On the one hand, activists built safe spaces in which they could (re)imagine their subjectivities and develop resistances to hegemonic voices. On the other hand, they staged and enacted those contestation scripts by appropriating and opening up private, public, and institutional spaces. Our results expand current understanding of dialogical organising, especially among female activists, by looking at the spatial and dialogical practices whereby precarious actors, who do not have a ‘place’ within the symbolic distribution of places, create spaces for themselves and for the possible

Can Test Familiarity Improve Performance on the National Hockey League Combine? A Case Study Analysis.

Test performance in athletes can be impacted by familiarity with test procedure, the environment in which testing is taking place, and perceived competency for achieving the desired outcome. However, there is a dearth of research on these factors in elite athletes. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to familiarize an elite-level ice hockey player with the protocols required in the National Hockey League Combine (NHL-C) and compare these tests results to his performance on the NHL-C. METHODS: An 18-year old ice-hockey player (who was invited to the NHL-C in 2023) volunteered to complete a battery of fitness testing eight days before the first day of the NHL-C using standardized NHL-C procedures. Testing included height, weight, wingspan, and body composition (BC) measures, the pro-agility test (P-A), hand-grip strength (HGS), a bench press (BP) for power, horizontal jump (HJ), vertical jump, squat jump, no-arm jump, a Wingate bike test for peak power (PP), average power (AV), and a fatigue index score (FI), pull-ups to fatigue (PU), a maximal effort bike test for aerobic fitness (AF), and a Y-Balance test (YBT). Testing was administered by a certified exercise physiologist using the same equipment and procedures used for the NHL-C. Prior to testing the subject provided informed consent and physician clearance. Test performance was compared to scores obtained on the NHL-C. RESULTS: Compared to baseline testing, increases in NHL-C scores were observed for right and left HGS (21.0% and 7.9%, respectively), BP (6.0%), PU (10.0%), YBT (4.2%), absolute and relative AF (6.0% and 7.0%, respectively), and PP (14.8%), along with improvements (decreases) in P-A times (2.2%). No changes were observed for BC, AV, and HJ, and a slight decrease was seen for FI and the three jump tests. CONCLUSIONS: Familiarity with the protocols, coupled with feedback on strategies to improve scores may have helped the subject with their NHL-C performance as there was likely insufficient time between the testing sessions for physiological adaptations to have explained improvements. Given the impact NHL-C performance may have on draft potential even small improvements may be beneficial. This supports the need for future research on the effect of test familiarity with small samples when the population they reflect is challenging to study as a large cohort

Lord of the Rings: A Kinematic Distance to Circinus X-1 from a Giant X-Ray Light Echo

Circinus X-1 exhibited a bright X-ray flare in late 2013. Follow-up observations with Chandra and XMM-Newton from 40 to 80 days after the flare reveal a bright X-ray light echo in the form of four well-defined rings with radii from 5 to 13 arcminutes, growing in radius with time. The large fluence of the flare and the large column density of interstellar dust towards Circinus X-1 make this the largest and brightest set of rings from an X-ray light echo observed to date. By deconvolving the radial intensity profile of the echo with the MAXI X-ray lightcurve of the flare we reconstruct the dust distribution towards Circinus X-1 into four distinct dust concentrations. By comparing the peak in scattering intensity with the peak intensity in CO maps of molecular clouds from the Mopra Southern Galactic Plane CO Survey we identify the two innermost rings with clouds at radial velocity ~ -74 km/s and ~ -81 km/s, respectively. We identify a prominent band of foreground photoelectric absorption with a lane of CO gas at ~ -32 km/s. From the association of the rings with individual CO clouds we determine the kinematic distance to Circinus X-1 to be $D_{Cir X-1} = 9.4^{+0.8}_{-1.0}$ kpc. This distance rules out earlier claims of a distance around 4 kpc, implies that Circinus X-1 is a frequent super-Eddington source, and places a lower limit of $\Gamma \gtrsim 22$ on the Lorentz factor and an upper limit of $\theta_{jet} \lesssim 3^{\circ}$ on the jet viewing angle.Comment: 20 pages, 21 figures, Astrophysical Journal, in prin

Galaxies Probing Galaxies at High Resolution: Co-Rotating Gas Associated with a Milky Way Analog at z=0.4

We present results on gas flows in the halo of a Milky Way-like galaxy at z=0.413 based on high-resolution spectroscopy of a background galaxy. This is the first study of circumgalactic gas at high spectral resolution towards an extended background source (i.e., a galaxy rather than a quasar). Using longslit spectroscopy of the foreground galaxy, we observe spatially extended H alpha emission with circular rotation velocity v=270 km/s. Using echelle spectroscopy of the background galaxy, we detect Mg II and Fe II absorption lines at impact parameter rho=27 kpc that are blueshifted from systemic in the sense of the foreground galaxy's rotation. The strongest absorber EW(2796) = 0.90 A has an estimated column density (N_H>10^19 cm-2) and line-of-sight velocity dispersion (sigma=17 km/s) that are consistent with the observed properties of extended H I disks in the local universe. Our analysis of the rotation curve also suggests that this r=30 kpc gaseous disk is warped with respect to the stellar disk. In addition, we detect two weak Mg II absorbers in the halo with small velocity dispersions (sigma<10 km/s). While the exact geometry is unclear, one component is consistent with an extraplanar gas cloud near the disk-halo interface that is co-rotating with the disk, and the other is consistent with a tidal feature similar to the Magellanic Stream. We can place lower limits on the cloud sizes (l>0.4 kpc) for these absorbers given the extended nature of the background source. We discuss the implications of these results for models of the geometry and kinematics of gas in the circumgalactic medium.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, submitted to ApJ, comments welcom

Normative Data for the NeuroCom Sensory Organization Test in US Military Special Operations Forces.

CONTEXT: Postural stability is the ability to control the center of mass in relation to a person\u27s base of support and can be affected by both musculoskeletal injury and traumatic brain injury. The NeuroCom Sensory Organization Test (SOT) can be used to objectively quantify impairments to postural stability. The ability of postural stability to predict injury and be used as an acute injury-evaluation tool makes it essential to the screening and rehabilitation process. To our knowledge, no published normative data for the SOT from a healthy, highly active population are available for use as a reference for clinical decision making. OBJECTIVE: To present a normative database of SOT scores from a US Military Special Operations population that can be used for future comparison. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: Human performance research laboratory. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS: A total of 542 active military operators from Naval Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen (n = 149), Naval Special Warfare Command, Sea, Air, and Land (n = 101), US Army Special Operations Command (n = 171), and Air Force Special Operations Command (n = 121). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Participants performed each of the 6 SOT conditions 3 times. Scores for each condition, total equilibrium composite score, and ratio scores for the somatosensory, visual, and vestibular systems were recorded. RESULTS: Differences were present across all groups for SOT conditions 1 (P \u3c .001), 2 (P = .001), 4 (P \u3e .001), 5 (P \u3e .001), and 6 (P = .001) and total equilibrium composite (P = .000), visual (P \u3e .001), vestibular (P = .002), and preference (P \u3e .001) NeuroCom scores. CONCLUSIONS: Statistical differences were evident in the distribution of postural stability across US Special Operations Forces personnel. This normative database for postural stability, as assessed by the NeuroCom SOT, can provide context when clinicians assess a Special Operations Forces population or any other groups that maintain a high level of conditioning and training

The Excitation of Extended Red Emission: New Constraints on its Carrier From HST Observations of NGC 7023

The carrier of the dust-associated photoluminescence process causing the extended red emission (ERE) in many dusty interstellar environments remains unidentified. Several competing models are more or less able to match the observed broad, unstructured ERE band. We now constrain the character of the ERE carrier further by determining the wavelengths of the radiation that initiates the ERE. Using the imaging capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope, we have resolved the width of narrow ERE filaments appearing on the surfaces of externally illuminated molecular clouds in the bright reflection nebula NGC 7023 and compared them with the depth of penetration of radiation of known wavelengths into the same cloud surfaces. We identify photons with wavelengths shortward of 118 nm as the source of ERE initiation, not to be confused with ERE excitation, however. There are strong indications from the well-studied ERE in the Red Rectangle nebula and in the high-|b| Galactic cirrus that the photon flux with wavelengths shortward of 118 nm is too small to actually excite the observed ERE, even with 100% quantum efficiency. We conclude, therefore, that ERE excitation results from a two-step process. While none of the previously proposed ERE models can match these new constraints, we note that under interstellar conditions most polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules are ionized to the di-cation stage by photons with E > 10.5 eV and that the electronic energy level structure of PAH di-cations is consistent with fluorescence in the wavelength band of the ERE. Therefore, PAH di-cations deserve further study as potential carriers of the ERE. (abridged)Comment: Accepted for Publication in the Ap