Heritage branding orientation: The case of Ach. Brito and the dynamics between corporate and product heritage brands

The notion of heritage branding orientation is introduced and explicated. Heritage branding orientation is designated as embracing both product and corporate brands and differs from corporate heritage brand orientation which has an explicit corporate focus. Empirical insights are drawn from an in-depth and longitudinal case study of Ach. Brito, a celebrated Portuguese manufacturer of soaps and toiletries. This study shows how, by the pursuance of a strategy derived from a heritage branding orientation Ach. Brito – after a prolonged period of decline – achieved a dramatic strategic turnaround. The findings reveal how institutional heritage can be a strategic resource via its adoption and activation at both the product and corporate levels. Moreover, the study showed how the bi-lateral interplay between product and corporate brand levels can be mutually reinforcing. In instrumental terms, the study shows how heritage can be activated and articulated in different ways. For instance, it can re-position both product and/or corporate brands; it can be meaningfully informed by product brand heritage and shape corporate heritage; and can be of strategic importance to both medium-sized and small enterprises

Matrix factorizations for nonaffine LG-models

We propose a natural definition of a category of matrix factorizations for nonaffine Landau-Ginzburg models. For any LG-model we construct a fully faithful functor from the category of matrix factorizations defined in this way to the triangulated category of singularities of the corresponding fiber. We also show that this functor is an equivalence if the total space of the LG-model is smooth.Comment: 12 pages, minor corrections of TEX fil

Does Oregon\u27s Constitution Need a Due Process Clause? Thoughts on Due Process and Other Limigations on State Action

During a legislative hearing last year, an Oregon state senator asked, “Does Oregon’s Constitution need a due process clause?” That question raises fundamental issues of constitutional law and of the relationship between the federal and state constitutions. Can and should state courts rely primarily on federal constitutional principles, made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, in deciding critical questions about the rights of criminal defendants, freedom of speech and religion, and equal protection? Or should state courts focus on their own constitutions—state due process, equal privileges and immunities, and similar “great ordinances” or more specific state provisions—in determining whether state laws and executive branch actions are valid? Would that focus still allow state courts to reach the “right” result in cases where no specific constitutional provision provides a clear basis for decision? Professor (and later Oregon Supreme Court Justice) Hans Linde’s path-breaking 1970 article, Without “Due Process”: Unconstitutional Law in Oregon,1 addressed some of those questions and contributed to the state constitutional revolution of the succeeding decades. That revolution, with its emphasis on examining the text and meaning of state constitutional provisions, has had the positive effect of requiring courts (and litigants) to articulate the specific interests at stake in light of those provisions, rather than engaging in an open-ended inquiry into whether a state’s economic regulatory scheme was arbitrary or unreasonable and thus potentially unconstitutional under the Federal Due Process Clause or whether a state law impermissibly interfered with some fundamental right. But it has its shortcomings as well, and, at times, has been susceptible to the same kind of result-oriented decisions for which substantive due-process-driven analysis has long been criticized. In this Essay, I briefly examine several aspects of state court reliance on “due process” provisions—both state and federal—in an effort to see what is lost and what is gained by relying instead on other state constitutional provisions. In doing so, we can see some of the changes in state constitutional interpretation forty-five years after Linde’s article and begin to seek an answer to our legislator’s question

Screening for UBE3A gene mutations in a group of Angelman syndrome patients selected according to non-stringent clinical criteria

Abstract.: The Angelman syndrome (AS) is caused by genetic abnormalities affecting the maternal copy of chromosome region 15q12. Until recently, the molecular diagnosis of AS relied on the detection of either a deletion at 15q11-13, a paternal uniparental disomy (UPD) for chromosome 15 or imprinting mutations. A fourth class of genetic defects underlying AS was recently described and consists of mutations of the UBE3A gene. The vast majority of mutations reported so far are predicted to cause major disruptions at the protein level. It is unclear whether mutations with less drastic consequences for the gene product could lead to milder forms of AS. We report on our results obtained by screening 101 clinically diagnosed AS patients for mutations in the UBE3A gene. Non-stringent clinical criteria were purposely applied for inclusion of AS patients in this study. The mutation search was carried out by single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP), and SSCP/restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analyses and revealed five novel UBE3A gene mutations as well as three different polymorphisms. All five mutations were detected in patients with typical features of AS and are predicted to cause frameshifts in four cases and the substitution of a highly conserved residue in the fifth. The results we obtained add to the as yet limited number of reports concerning UBE3A gene mutations. Important aspects that emerge from the data available to date is that the four classes of genetic defects known to underlie AS do not appear to cover all cases. The genetic defect underlying approximately 10% of AS cases, including some familial cases, remains unknow

Health Professionals as Rights Advisers: Rights Advice and Primary Healthcare Services

BACKGROUND: Evidence of associations between social problems and morbidity supports a broad approach to service provision in general practice. Some social problems linked with morbidity involve people’s rights. They can be mitigated through the provision of advice about people’s rights. Without advice, people are often in a poor position to make informed decisions about how to best address such problems. Objectives: This study explores the current scale of involvement by doctors and other health professionals in the provision of advice about problems involving rights. METHODS: The study is based on an in-depth random national survey of 5,015 adults. The survey explored people’s experience of and the strategies employed to resolve problems involving rights. It documented the extent to which people sought advice from doctors and other health professionals about such problems. RESULTS: Health professionals provided advice in relation to 6 per cent of problems about which advice was obtained. The figure was 2 per cent even when problems centring upon, or reported to have led to, ill-health were discounted. Some respondents characterised the advice offered by health professionals as ‘legal’, and one respondent reported being advised to commence legal proceedings. CONCLUSIONS: Questions are raised about the skills, awareness and training of professionals who provide rights advice, about the role of rights advice in primary healthcare settings and about arrangements for the provision of advice to patients facing problems involving legal rights. It is suggested that the provision of outreach rights advice services in general practice settings, particularly in fields such as welfare law, represents a constructive measure that can be expected to promote both justice and health outcomes

Unmanageable Debt and Financial Difficulty in the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey: Report for the Money Advice Trust

The following report uses three years of data from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey (CSJS), a face-to-face household survey of people’s experience of and response to rights problems, to examine respondents who reported problems associated with unmanageable debt and financial difficulty. The research was commissioned by the Money Advice Trust with the aim of enriching and supporting existing research regarding people in debt, with reference to adviceseeking strategies, impact of debt problems, and the interrelationship between debt and other problems

The Experience of Money and Debt Problems in Rural Areas

This current paper is written on the behalf of the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) to partly address the shortfall in evidence concerning the advice needs of rural communities. Specifically the CRC was interested to gain insight in the following areas: (1) The type of debt problems experienced in rural areas; (2) The prevalence and response to such problems; (3) Issues concerning access to debt advice services in rural areas; and (4) Awareness of advice provision in rural areas