591,259 research outputs found
Small and medium-size enterprises in economic development : possiblities for research and policy
No full textThe World Bank's most important long-term advantage in promoting development, says the author, may lie in opportunities to address related obstacles simultaneously. It could mount concurrent efforts to address the problems of small and medium-size enterprises in a particular sector, region, or economy, for example. It could address the conditions of founding new firms, providing finance or technical assistance, developing mutual support institutions, resolving disputes, and perhaps reducing counterproductive government interventions. Were the Bank to follow such a coordinated approach, programs could be designed to generate data to illuminate the impacts and interactions of various elements of policy. These data could be exploited, then, in research designs, or even the design of management information systems, shaped by program evaluation. The author proposes four general issues for research (plus a series of topics for each issue). (1) Can Bank initiatives involving small and medium-size enterprises in developing countries facilitate the entry of these enterprises into similar learning relationships with other firms - foreign firms, larger firms in their own countries, or each other? (2) The economic significance of high"turbulence"(entry and exit rates) in small-firm populations is poorly understood. The fact of high turbulence is well-documented in industrial countries; it is not for developing countries, but available data suggest a broadly similar pattern. Are high failure rates for small businesses symptomatic of an important shortcoming in the system of economic organization itself? Or should the unit of analysis be the enterprise, the entrepreneur, or the entrepreneur's family? (3) Is the apparent trend favoring a larger economic role for smaller production units autonomous rather than induced by other changes? Does it depend on general operating factors such as the declining costs of communication and computation? (4) The rate of learning by a small firm may depend on the nature of its transacting partner. Certain multinational enterprises make good teachers, for example, but certain local labor markets or markets for consumer goods and services may not be well-positioned for relevant learning. They may learn well how to adjust to local circumstances but not to the international diffusion of technology and ways of organizing (the main source of hope for developing countries). Perhaps Bank policy should be more concerned with transaction patterns.General Technology,Environmental Economics&Policies,Decentralization,ICT Policy and Strategies,Small and Medium Size Enterprises,Environmental Economics&Policies,General Technology,Small and Medium Size Enterprises,ICT Policy and Strategies,Small Scale Enterprise
Small area estimation via m-quantile geographically weighted regression
No full textThe effective use of spatial information, that is the geographic locations of population units, in a regression model-based approach to small area estimation is an important practical issue. One approach for incorporating such spatial information in a small area regression model is via Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). In GWR the relationship between the outcome variable and the covariates is characterised by local rather than global parameters, where local is defined spatially. In this paper we investigate GWR-based small area estimation under the M-quantile modelling approach. In particular, we specify an M-quantile GWR model that is a local model for the M-quantiles of the conditional distribution of the outcome variable given the covariates. This model is then used to define a bias-robust predictor of the small area characteristic of interest that also accounts for spatial association in the data. An important spin-off from applying the M-quantile GWR small area model is that it can potentially offer more efficient synthetic estimation for out of sample areas. We demonstrate the usefulness of this framework through both model-based as well as design-based simulations, with the latter based on a realistic survey data set. The paper concludes with an illustrative application that focuses on estimation of average levels of Acid Neutralizing Capacity for lakes in the north-east of the USA.<br/
Exploratory talk within collaborative small groups in mathematics
No full textThis report describes one aspect of a wider research study on exploratory talk within collaborative small groups in secondary mathematics lessons. It outlines students’ views of using collaborative activity to learn mathematics. The fuller research study explores the extent to which exploratory talk occurs in collaborative peer groups in secondary mathematics classrooms
A Multi-Language Comparison of Influences on Author Verification using Character N-Grams
No full textWe create a new multi-language corpus for author verification based on Wikipedia talkpages, and evaluate the influence that differences in topic and time have on character n-gram author profiles. Topic alignment between two texts is found to increase author verification precision, and an authors writing style is found to change over time, but not more significantly after 3 years than after 1 year.Information ArchitectureWISElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
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Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach
No full textForensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist “approaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language [. . . ], their own idiolect” (Coulthard, 2004: 31). However, given the diXculty in empirically substantiating a theory of idiolect, there is growing concern in the Veld that it remains too abstract to be of practical use (Kredens, 2002; Grant, 2010; Turell, 2010). Stylistic, corpus, and computational approaches to text, however, are able to identify repeated collocational patterns, or n-grams, two to six word chunks of language, similar to the popular notion of soundbites: small segments of no more than a few seconds of speech that journalists are able to recognise as having news value and which characterise the important moments of talk. The soundbite oUers an intriguing parallel for authorship attribution studies, with the following question arising: looking at any set of texts by any author, is it possible to identify ‘n-gram textbites’, small textual segments that characterise that author’s writing, providing DNA-like chunks of identifying material
The Use of Hosted Enterprise Applications by SMEs: A User Perspective
No full textThis paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the engagement of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in hosted enterprise applications (high complexity e-business applications) in the UK by investigating the relevance of organisational and technical factors through conducting interviews with SME users of hosted applications. The emergence and development of the application service provider (ASP) sector has attracted much interest and highly optimistic forecasts for revenues. Of particular interest in this paper is the emergence of service offerings targeted specifically at SMEs. The paper starts by considering information technology (IT) adoption by SMEs in general before reviewing the provision of hosted enterprise applications in the US and UK. The empirical data collected from SME users of hosted enterprise applications is then analysed in order to produce the key findings and conclusions. From an SME user perspective the key findings to emerge from the study include: i) confirmation that ICT infrastructure was no longer a barrier to adoption, ii) the pragmatic approach taken to security issues, iii) the use of both multiple information systems (hosted and resident) and service providers, iv) the attractiveness of the rental cost model and v) the intention to continue or extend their use of hosted applications within the enterprise. The early promise of the ASP sector appears not to have been generally realised for SMEs in the UK. This study explores the experience of early adopters of this new IT related innovation and identifies some significant business gains experienced by SME users. It also highlights the opportunity for gaining competitive advantage by using hosted enterprise applications to reduce costs. There are very few empirical studies of hosted applications which take a deliberately SME user perspective and this paper make an important contribution in this emerging field
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
A study of procurement behaviour in small firms
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to introduce research which analyses buyer-supplier relationships from the perspective of small and medium firms (SMEs). The study to be outlined shows that actors within a supply chain are not homogeneous in terms of their size, resources and business motives, which bring into question the validity and relevance of the purchasing literature when examining small firms. The paper will explain the usefulness and importance of studying purchasing behaviour in SMEs and explain how these relationships might differ depending on the nature of the firm. The methodology for the field research will be explained in the paper. The fieldwork draws principally from a series of interviews undertaken with owner-managers within plastic moulding companies in Lancashire. The empirical data will be explored in some depth with a particular focus on their implications for practice
Mapping 50 Years of Small Group Research Through Small Group Research
No full textThis is the Accepted Manuscript version of Emich, K. J., Kumar, S., Lu, L., Norder, K., & Pandey, N. (2020). Mapping 50 Years of Small Group Research Through Small Group Research. Small Group Research, 51(6), 659–699. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496420934541. This article was originally published in Small Group Research. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496420934541. © The Author(s) 2020.At its 50-year milestone, we assess the Small Group Research (SGR) corpus to reflect on the development of group research over the past half century. To do this, we examine the evolution of the corpus’s context and content. We examine its context by assessing its impact, which journals it communicates with, and the internationality of its authors. We examine its content—the topics discussed in its articles—using keyword clustering and co-occurrence network analysis. We identify 10 research communities and track their relationships over the four editorial periods associated with the SGR corpus (lagged 2 years for influence): 1970–1981, 1982–1991, 1992–2010, and 2011–2019. Our analyses indicate that the global and local study of group dynamics has fluctuated over time and that phenomenologically based topics connect theoretical topics and stimulate theoretical development. We also provide three criteria to identify communities and topics of group research most likely to benefit from future integration.The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
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