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

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.

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

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

Worldviews and discursive construction of GMO-related risk perceptions in Turkey

This paper analyses the discursive construction of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) issue in the Turkish political arena following the public debate on the pending legislation on biosecurity. The study proposes an operational approach to semiotic/actor network theory (Latour) applied to public representations of a new technology within the theoretical frameworks of social representation theory and cultural theory of risks. It aims to highlight how different worldviews produce different risk discourses of GMOs in Turkey. Using cluster analysis to inductively extract evaluative categories, we use these to identify themes by human coding. Lastly, we apply formal concept analysis to link themes to actors and their worldviews, establishing their semantic networks. Formal concept analysis revealed four discourse networks reflecting nationalist, Islamist, progressive (left) and neo-liberal worldviews. Finally, these structures will be grounded back in the articles for a richer interpretive analysis

PUS in turbulent times II: a shifting vocabulary that brokers inter-disciplinary knowledge

To reflect further on 20 years of the journal, we present a lexicographic and bibliometric study of all papers published in Public Understanding of Science (PUS). Lexicographical analysis of the vocabulary of 465 abstracts shows five classes of associated concepts in two periods, 1992-2001 and 2002-2010. The concern for public attitudes and mass media coverage remains on the card; while language has shifted from 'public understanding' to 'public engagement' and environmental concerns have waned then waxed. The bibliometric analysis traces the position of PUS in the inter-citation network of 165 related journals (ISI Web of Science citation database), grouped into 10 disciplines for the purpose of this analysis. Indicators derived from network logic show that the established position of PUS has been stable since 1997. PUS serves a varied brokerage role as gatekeeper into and liaison maker between disciplines. Its inter-citation network position allows PUS to perform inter-disciplinary boundary spanning work that offers a safe space for experimentation with ideas