The Seventh Corridor of the Belt and Road Initiative

Since the launch of Chinese “One belt, One Road (OBOR)” initiative in September 2013 later renamed as "Belt and Road initiative (BRI)" the bulk of academic research has been devoted to the evaluation of the suggested land and maritime routes of this gigantic project. In recent years the main focus of the Western and especially American expert community was the link between BRI and Chinese foreign policy strategy with more emphasize of possible negative ramifications of the project for the states involved. The terms such as “Debt diplomacy” or “Debt trap” were disseminating more and more in both academic and political circles.  Meanwhile, the Chinese and into some extent Russian experts were seeking to delegitimize the Western claims and to accentuate the mainly positive results of the BRI. In this battle of arguments, rejections, and accusations the countries not initially included in BRI were under attack of uncertainty and ambiguity – what BRI is really about and is it worth to make efforts to be included there

Faktor-faktor Penentu Komitmen Organisasi Kepala Smk (Studi Kasus pada Smk di Kota Medan)

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui faktor-faktor penentu komitmen organisasi kepala SMK di Kota Medan, dan menentukan model teoretik yang dapat menggambarkan hubungan kausalistik antarvariabel laten yang menentukan komitmen organisasi kepala sekolah. Populasi penelitian sebanyak 152 orang dan sampel 110 yang diambil dengan teknik proportional random sampling. Data komitmen organisasi, budaya organisasi, kepemimpinan, komunikasi interpersonal, dan kepuasan kerja dijaring dengan menggunakan kuesioner model skala Likert. Uji persyaratan analisis mencakup uji normalitas data dan uji linieritas regresi, sedangkan untuk menguji hipotesis penelitian digunakan path analysis. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kesepuluh hipotesis yang diajukan berpengaruh langsung terhadap hal-hal terkait yang dikaji. Berdasarkan penerimaan kesepuluh hipotesis penelitian, ditemukan s s u u a a t t u u model teoretik yang menggambarkan struktur hubungan kausal antara variabel budaya organisasi, kepemimpinan, komunikasi interpersonal, kepuasan kerja, dan komitmen organisasi kepala SMK

Entrepreneurship as Emergence

Emergence is at the core of entrepreneurship research, which has explored the coming-intobeing of opportunities, new organizations, re-organizations, and new industries, agglomerations, and so on. Emergence is also at the theoretical core of complexity science, which is essentially dedicated to exploring how and why emergence happens in dynamic systems (like entrepreneurship). This exploration begins by defining Opportunity In-tension as a dynamic interplay of personal agency and perceived opportunity, which is a catalyst for entrepreneurial behavior. Then I propose two insights about emergence, based on recent research in complexity science. First, a process theory for emergence is presented, which integrates Gartner’s model of “organizing” with the Dissipative Structures Theory of order creation. Second, a definition for emergence is derived, which leads to a surprising notion that emergence can occur in “degrees” (i.e. 1ST–degree emergence, 2ND–degree emergence, and 3RD–degree emergence). Through this approach I suggest that entrepreneurship incorporates a much broader range of phenomenon than may have been previously thought. In a sense, by claiming emergence as a foundation for entrepreneurship, both disciplines can find new ground for research and application

Moving Far From Far-From-Equilibrium: Opportunity Tension as the Driver of Emergence

Complexity scholars have identified two distinct drivers of emergence: (1) Far-from-equilibrium dynamics that trigger order creation, and (2) adaptive tension (McKelvey, 2004) which can push a system toward instability, leading to the emergence of new order. In this paper I suggest that both are true but incomplete. For example, when drawn out to the extreme, a far-fromequilibrium framework generates a contradiction by suggesting that the most dynamic organizations are the ones farthest-from-thermodynamic equilibrium – like Exxon or GE for example. Adaptive tension portrays the effect of a dynamic push without identifying the cause. I suggest “Opportunity Tension” as an alternative, which captures the entrepreneurial passion inherent in the drive for order creation and emergence. Opportunity Tension occurs in “pulses,” each cycle leading to a new dynamic state of the system. At a broader level, this model is captured by the notion of “dynamic disequiibrium” (Chiles et al., in press), a construct that indeed moves us far from the issues raised in far-from-equilibrium approaches