This longitudinal research positioned at the juncture of tourism, entrepreneurship and transition economies studies investigates the specific informal personal network veza of tourism entrepreneurs. ...The study discusses the triggers of network formation and their role and utilisation through the entire business lifecycle. Findings demonstrate that veza ties have a dual role in the lifecycle both as main facilitator of entrepreneurial activity and as driver of success of entrepreneurial ventures by providing necessary resources and overcoming barriers in a turbulent institutional environment. This study contributes to tourism social sciences by providing an integrative framework to study the emergence, formation and utilisation of entrepreneurial informal networks in tourism in transition economies.
•Investigates informal networks of tourism entrepreneurs•Qualitative longitudinal study•Specific informal network veza elaborated•Dual role identified: necessary condition for existence and driver of success
Party patronage combined with a collectivist culture appears to present a very resistant socialist legacy in Croatia. In-group favouritism and an overly bureaucratised system provide a fertile soil ...for uhljebs. An uhljeb is a public sector employee whose main 'competence' is membership of a political party or a nepotistic relationship. They now already count in the thousands, and often contribute to the further multiplication of uhljebs, and to an increase in clientelist arrangements. The practice of employing uhljebs both undermines and underpins the existing system. That ambivalence is one of the characteristics of the Russian sistema, and that is one of the important links to compare blat users and uhljebs, in addition to the practice of 'pulling strings'. As key protagonists, uhljebs and blat users illustrate their own and society's modus operandi: an intense 'economy of favours'. Recent studies increasingly show that cultural variables influence economic outcomes and this article presents an extension of the 'economy of favours' into Croatia's paradigm. Based on primary sources and international benchmarks, it provides a comparison of the cultural contexts of Eastern and Western European countries, and portrays a rising informal practice that, despite its omnipresence, has been under-researched in the academic literature.
This article identifies relationships that dominate small and medium businesses in Mongolia. Unlike other parts of Asia, these relationships are not necessarily hierarchical, nor are they purely ...market-driven. Rather, they are characterized by groups of people who sustain each other's businesses and the social relations that hold them in place. In identifying such relations, we extend questions raised in the 'economy of favours' literature. If favours granted between known individuals are not simply about economic transactions, we ask, then what does this say about the kind of capitalist economy prevalent in Mongolia? Not simply an outcome of external forms of financialization, nor a remnant of the socialist planned economy, these relations open up the possibility for a range of ways of doing business in a climate that does not guarantee economic and social security in the sense that we may be familiar with. Attending to the way business deals and people are made and remade within networks and groups, capitalism is opened up to an economic diversity that shapes it from within.
This article ethnographically outlines how one woman politician in a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina used favours to help ‘get things done’, becoming perceived as a ‘goddess’ who ‘spent herself’ for ...the sake of others. The article suggests that such people managed to gather power through the paradox of keeping‐while‐giving (Weiner, . Inalienable possessions. The paradox of keeping‐while‐giving. Berkeley: California UP). People able to grant numerous favours in multiple public and private arenas kept aside the position of the person able to manage ambiguity, which was part of the new ad hoc, flexible forms of governance, exercised by both the international and the local actors in the country.
La gestion de l'ambiguïté: faveurs et flexibilité en Bosnie‐Herzégovine
Cet article décrit ethnographiquement comment une femme politique dans une ville en Bosnie‐Herzégovine a utilisé des faveurs pour « faire avancer les choses », devenant perçu comme une « déesse » qui « s'est épuisée » pour le bien des autres. L'article suggère que ces personnes parviennent à rassembler pouvoir par le paradoxe de donner tout en gardant (Weiner, . Inalienable possessions. The paradox of keeping‐while‐giving. Berkeley: California UP). Les gens en mesure d'accorder de nombreux faveurs dans de multiples domaines public et privé mettent de côté la position de la personne en mesure de gérer l'ambiguïté, ce qui fait partie de la nouvelle forme flexible de gouvernance ad hoc, exercés aussi bien dans le pays par les acteurs internationaux et locaux.
Abstract
Technological advances, in developing countries, without considering environmental health issues have generated microsites uninhabitable to organisms including usual bacteria. While ...extremophilic microorganisms thrive in such locations. It is the high time to isolate and conserve the extremophilic biodiversity from such man made habitats before the environmental awareness treats them to the level of "destructionâ. For biotechnology processes to be geared by employing extremophilic microorganisms, locations characterized with high/low temperature for most part of the year, hypersaline brine and abneutral pH environments may render the respective microbes to do their allotted/required jobs with minimal of extraneous investments. Besides, many known and expected potentials of extremophilic bacteria for biotechnological applications, major attraction lies in operating bioprocesses under non-aseptic conditions for making them economically feasible.
This review after giving a thumbnail picture of extremophilies' known features is centered on the triad of biodiversity richness, environmental availabilities/managements of locations suitable for respective biotechnological bioprocesses and their non-aseptic designing for a developing country like Pakistan.
Deconstructing Corruption Borooah, Vani K.
Journal of South Asian development,
04/2016, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article employs a unique set of data to paint a quantitative picture of the nature of corruption in rural India by computing the proportion of approaches to various officials that resulted in a ...bribe, thus providing a ranking of officials by ‘corruption rate’; examining the size of the bribe associated with the different reasons for approaching officials; showing that in the case of officials who received approaches for a variety of purposes, the same official could charge a different bribe depending on the nature of the work to be done; testing whether corruption in India has increased over time and finally, by using the method of inequality decomposition, analyzing the extent to which observed inequality in the bribes paid by different households could be due to the facts that (i) different households paid differently for the same purpose and (ii) different purposes required bribes of different amounts, with each household paying the same amount for a particular purpose. The article shows that of the occasions on which households approached officials for getting their work done, 18 per cent resulted in a bribe, averaging `147, being paid. Not only that, every area of interaction between citizens and officials to get some work done resulted in someone, somewhere having to pay a bribe. Even the provision of basic facilities, such as drinking water and sanitation, was not exempted. Compounding this, we find systematic evidence that corruption in India has increased in the past 15 years. The existence of corruption is overlaid with a degree of inequality: The size of the bribe varied depending upon the official approached and the purpose of the approach.