The moral legitimacy of entrepreneurs: An analysis of early-stage entrepreneurship across 26 countries

This article develops our socio-cultural understanding of entrepreneurship by examining the influence of the moral legitimacy of entrepreneurs upon an individual’s engagement in early-stage entrepreneurship. A multilevel analysis conducted across 26 countries demonstrates that the higher the perceived degree of moral legitimacy, the more likely an individual is to consider starting a business, to begin preparing a business and to progress to actually found and run the business. We conclude that moral norms in society are an important influence upon early-stage entrepreneurship; thus, it is critical to legitimize the position of entrepreneurs as moral and beneficial for society as a whole

Editorial

Welcome to the second edition of the International Journal for Researcher Development. In this issue, we are pleased to include an in-depth study on the professionality of researchers per se. In her article, ‘Developing research capacity in the social sciences: a professionality-based model’ Linda Evans draws attention to the importance of both developing a research culture and developing researchers themselves. She suggests that leadership in research is failing to achieve the development of institutional research capacity to an acceptable standard whilst researchers themselves are unaware of the necessity to develop continually. In our next article, Fowler and colleagues present evidence from a recent study as to the factors that are necessary to facilitate the building of research capacity in the UK. In their article, ‘Building research capacity across the UK: evidence from recent initiatives in England, Scotland and Wales’ they recommend more explicit institutional commitment to the professional development of research staff and suggest that this should include the facilitation of mentoring relationships between more and less experienced researchers. The paper by Pitcher and Akerlind provides an international slant by presenting results of a novel study using metaphor analysis across several Australian Universities. This enabled conceptions of research by researchers to be categorized. Finally, we include a report on discussions based around evaluating developmental activities for researchers in higher education. In the UK, Roberts funding came on-line in 2002 to support the development of skills training for post-graduate researchers – to assist their employability. That tranche of funding is nearing its end and universities across the UK are now having to evaluate the worth of the products of that funding and how to fund it, if at all, in the future. The Gough report on the discussions surrounding the development of an evaluation approach make interesting reading

Institutional fields as linked arenas: Inter-field resource dependence, institutional work and institutional change

Theories of institutional change have paid limited attention to the ways in which relations between institutional fields might facilitate or hinder institutional change. I introduce inter-field resource dependence as an important condition explaining institutional change between fields. Building on resource dependence theory, I conceptualize two dimensions of inter-field resource dependence: mutual dependence and power imbalance. I argue that these two dimensions have opposite effects on the likelihood of institutional change between fields. Mutual dependence between two fields increases the chances of institutional change by inducing actors in both the fields to work at creating new shared institutions in order to regulate their mutual dependence. Power imbalance between two fields decreases the chances of institutional change by inducing actors in the dominant field to work at maintaining existing institutions in order to preserve their power. Thus, different types of inter-field resource dependence motivate actors to undertake different forms of institutional work, which in turn shape the likelihood of institutional change between fields. Developing this core argument, I theorize that whether the institutional change occurring between two fields is radical or incremental is a function of the type of resource dependence linking the two fields; for example, when power imbalance is high, institutional change is unlikely but when it occurs it tends to be radical

Predicting the Next Best View for 3D Mesh Refinement

3D reconstruction is a core task in many applications such as robot navigation or sites inspections. Finding the best poses to capture part of the scene is one of the most challenging topic that goes under the name of Next Best View. Recently, many volumetric methods have been proposed; they choose the Next Best View by reasoning over a 3D voxelized space and by finding which pose minimizes the uncertainty decoded into the voxels. Such methods are effective, but they do not scale well since the underlaying representation requires a huge amount of memory. In this paper we propose a novel mesh-based approach which focuses on the worst reconstructed region of the environment mesh. We define a photo-consistent index to evaluate the 3D mesh accuracy, and an energy function over the worst regions of the mesh which takes into account the mutual parallax with respect to the previous cameras, the angle of incidence of the viewing ray to the surface and the visibility of the region. We test our approach over a well known dataset and achieve state-of-the-art results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, to be published in IAS-1

Backscattering of Acoustic Signals from Inhomogenuities in Solids

Examination of the backscattering of ultrasonic waves has been suggested as a possible technique for the non-destructive evaluation of materials because it involves a simple measurement requiring access to a single surface only and because the conversion of normally incident, longitudinal waves to shear waves is minimal at a scattering angle of 180°. While the measurement is simple to carry out, the return signal may be quite complicated, especially for polycrystalline or composite materials. These materials possess local inhomogeneities of differing sizes,orientation and elastic properties from which a plane wave may scatter, often more than once, and then the scattered waves from one or more sources may interfere among themselves. These difficulties are often compounded by coupling among the several modes of propagation associated with inhomogeneity and lead to a dispersion of the incident wave. Thus the backscattered signal represents the complex, three-dimensional, phase sensetive scattering from a material that mat not be well characterized. While there has been substantial effort and much progress in developing techniques for the reconstruction of characteristics of the medium from the scattering of an acoustic wave an accurate prediction of the scattering from inhomogeneous and anisotropic medium, such as a composite material, remains a difficult problem. Generally speaking, our lack of a detailed knowledge of the structure of the medium over distances large enough to support a significant dispersal of the wave makes the development of a reliable model of the medium a formidible task

How market standards affect building design: the case of low energy design in commercial offices

This paper develops existing work on building design through a focus on one important yet understudied form of regulation: market standards. Market standards are agreed upon definitions of ‘necessary’ provision in buildings and are fundamental in ‘formatting’ markets and determining the value of a building in the market. The paper presents a case study of the design of ten commercial offices in London, UK, the effects of market standards on the designs and on the potential for the development of lower energy buildings. Theoretically, the paper integrates literatures on standards, institutions and markets to argue that market standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that requires closer scrutiny. In particular, we show that market standards: are an important form of normative and cultural regulation in the field of commercial office design; format and act as calculative devices in property markets; and result in forms of knowledge diminution that break the relationship between building design and occupiers’ practices. Together, these effects result in particular designs being legitimised and valued, and lower energy designs being delegitimised, devalued and pushed to the periphery of the attention of commercial office designers

Governors and directors: Competing models of corporate governance

Why do we use the term ‘corporate governance’ rather than ‘corporate direction’? Early British joint stock companies were normally managed by a single ‘governor’. The ‘court of governors’ or ‘board of directors’ emerged slowly as the ruling body for companies. By the nineteenth century, however, companies were typically run by directors while not-for-profit entities such as hospitals, schools and charitable bodies had governors. The nineteenth century saw steady refinement of the roles of company directors, often in response to corporate scandals, with a gradual change from the notion of the director as a ‘representative shareholder’ to the directors being seen collectively as ‘representatives of the shareholders’. Governors in not-for-profit entities, however, were regarded as having broader responsibilities. The term ‘governance’ itself suggests that corporate boards should be studied as ‘political’ entities rather than merely through economic lenses such as agency theory

Global institutions and local filtering: Introducing independent directors to Taiwanese corporate boards

Drawing on the idea of selective interaction between organizations and environments, the authors examine how organizations change their traditional practices when they are exposed to new institutional environments. In the context of corporate governance change in response to financial market globalization, they argue that global institutional influence is moderated by local corporate control contexts that function as filtering mechanisms. The authors empirically analyse the adoption of a new corporate governance practice, i.e., the initial introduction of independent directors, in Taiwanese public firms, where family governance has been a dominant governance model. The findings suggest that while firms exposed to US capital markets are more likely to adopt independent directors, this facilitating effect weakens when the firms are under strong family control and is amplified when they are unbound from local frameworks through the key leader???s education or their geographic context