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It's well understood that medical device manufacturers must comply with stringent quality standards, and they require a quality management system (QMS) to register their products and bring them to market. [...]

This study aims to explore the implementation of scorecards and dashboards in assessing internationalization activities in universities. The methodology of this concept paper is referencing secondary data comprising established academic databases from Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), and Google Scholar, focusing on aspects related to the benefits, monitoring, and effectiveness of scorecards and dashboards in evaluating an internationalization process or activity carried out by a university. The improvement of a university's reputation and ranking should be based on several key factors such as academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, and international student ratio. These are the same criteria considered by institutions such as Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE), which rank and rate universities and institutions of higher education around the world. This study found that implementing scorecards and dashboards in evaluating a university to improve its reputation and ranking is indeed effective. This is due to various factors, including the benefits, effectiveness, and accurate measurement offered by the scorecards and dashboards and their widespread use in universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

December 1994 saw the Russian military launch an assault on Grozny, capital of the obscure Caucasian autonomous republic of Chechnya, in an effort to put an end to its pretensions to national independence. Three years earlier, in 1991, a renegade Chechen general in the Russian Army, Djokar Dudayev, had acceded to the pleadings of Chechen “elders” who wished to take the territory out of the Russian Federation-Russia. By mid-1996, what had quite unexpectedly become a very bloody operation, and a political hot potato in Moscow, remained uncompleted. In spite of a declaration of cease-fire by President Yeltsin and the killing of Dudayev, Chechen “freedom fighters” based in the mountains and villages continued to wage an Afghan-style struggle against the “occupiers” from Moscow. After some 30,000 deaths, most of them civilian, there was no end in sight.Is the war in Chechnya sui generis, as some would claim? Or is it symptomatic of a broader class of wars? As of late 1995, according to the Kennedy School’s Project on Internal Conflict (Harvard University), some 35 major armed intra-state struggles were underway around the world. In a number of ways, Chechnya is unique, but it can also be seen as an archetype for similar conflicts taking place, or pending, around the world.Why the apparent increase in ethnic conflict in the early 1990s? What, if anything, might the United States and the rest of the world do in the future to prevent such carnage from becoming an accepted feature of global politics? Absent satisfactory explanations of these crises, the chances are better than even that, within the next few years, the United States and its allies will find themselves confronted by a similar “no-win” situation in any one of the dozens of places where very little provocation will trigger new episodes of ethnic cleansing.We offer an account of the causes of ethnic and sectarian conflict that is applicable to a growing number of countries and regions. In brief: What we have come to call “ethnic and sectarian conflict” is neither ethnic nor sectarian per se. Rather, it is about struggles over the levers of power and wealth within societies and countries in which ethnicity and religion provide the cultural and historical resources for mobilizing popular support for particular elites. These countries are almost always caught in the throes of economic and political transformations, brought on by external factors and forces. These erode or destroy old social, political and economic relations—old ways of doing things—and conflicts follow. The outcomes of such struggles are not pre-determined—ethnic cleansing is not dictated by some kind of historical materialism. There are possibilities for intervention before violence erupts.

Drawing on our experience requesting access to police organisations in Ghana and Niger, this article explores the organisation and operation of two West African bureaucracies. It focuses on the administrative modes and the state agents' routines in their dealing with civil actors. Exceptional and risk carrying requests such as ours concerning a permission to conduct participant observation in police organisations create insecurity on the part of the bureaucrats concerned. Although rarely expressed in field reports and often discounted as a series of fortunate coincidences, we consider the researcher's access (or refusal) a crucial and illuminating moment of fieldwork. In our case, both technical bureaucratic operations and informal networks played a central role in our own approach as well as in the state agents' work routines and reflections on their daily occupation. Following an emic description, we call these two modes of procedure "ground work" and "paper work". The oscillating between the two reflects an inevitable interlacing of bureaucratic and informal operations, characteristic for bureaucratic organisations worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-author papers are the lowest relative contributors to the research output of international open access journals BioInvasions Records (BIR), Aquatic Invasions (AI) and Management of Biological Invasions (MBI), accounting for 5% or less of published papers. In contrast, papers by four or more authors are the highest contributors, accounting for over half of the research output for the three journals. Papers by two or three authors are intermediate between these extremes, accounting for 15-23% of research ouputs. The relative contributions of research papers by single-authors to the output of AI and MBI has also significantly declined over time, while concurrently those by four or more authors has significantly increased. Although not significant, a similar pattern is also evident in BIR. Considering invasion ecology research, factors such as increasing globalisation, the increasing use of transboundary data-sets for invasive species and the proliferation of collaborative multidisciplinary author teams with multiple skill-sets, may be driving single-author papers to extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LCA studies on waste management have been promoted as they can help policy makers choose the best environmental options. However, the increasing globalization of raw materials and waste makes the optimization of waste management strategies and policies quite challenging. Therefore, new approaches are needed in order to identify the consequences of markets on the waste management systems. This paper concentrates on the quantification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of recycling processes. The aim is to generate a comprehensive assessment of GHG emissions as a consequence of increasing the amount of material collected for recycling. Consequential life cycle assessment (CLCA) is an effective methodological framework for addressing GHG quantifications within market, but to properly perform and assess all of the market links between raw materials and waste, it is necessary to determine the cause-effect chains made up of physical flows. Thus, we propose integrating the methodologies of material flow analysis (MFA) and CLCA. We applied these methodologies to the paper and cardboard recycling system in Spain. The GHG results varied between −36 kg CO 2 eq. and −317 kg CO 2 eq. per ton of waste paper collected, depending on the quantity of waste paper exported and the source of marginal pulp considered. The cumulative energy demand (CED) was also calculated as complementary indicator. Similar trends as for GHG emissions were obtained. The future GHG quantifications should be based on the flows described by MFA analysis and should be quantified using CLCA because methodologies that accurately account for GHG are necessary for decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are highly important for producing highvalue-added innovative and intermediary goods and play a crucial role in being suppliers of large enterprises, their financial restraints cause them to encounter problems regarding their internationalization process and financial performance. As a dynamic capability of Resourcebased View theory (RBV), the usage of marketing communication tools (MCTs) by SMEs, such as social media (SM), websites, telemarketing, direct mail, SMS campaigns, and Google Adwords, increases the competitiveness of SMEs and might enable them to reduce their financial performance and export concerns. However, the usage of these tools can differ depending on the firm's country of origin since countries have various socio-economic and cultural conditions that affect the competitiveness of firms and their marketing communication approaches to their export and financial performance. In this regard, this paper aims to find international differences in the impact of the usage of MCTs on export and financial performance. This paper examines 1221 SMEs from Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary for this aim. The researchers created an online questionnaire to collect data from randomly selected respondents in the research sample. The researchers also ran Binary Logistic Regression analyses for analysis purposes. Although this paper confirms international differences in the impact of MCTs on the export of SMEs, the effect of SM usage on the financial performance of SMEs does not differ depending on the SMEs' country of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sur: Revista Internacional de Direitos Humanos is the property of Conectas Direitos Humanos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry is the property of Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There is no doubt whatsoever that the papers presented in this volume cover a very wide, even extensive range of topics. This is of course logical, given the multi-disciplinary nature of this scientifical project. Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to present no less than eight papers devoted to new results and ideas in fields as diverse as psychology, philosophy, political science and law, dealing with matters such as electoral behavior, globalization, the concept of democracy, the role of experts or the relevance of thinkers such as Plato and Hobbes for the current discussion on the EU constitution. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1837316

Economic Growth is a vital condition for human Development, yet not adequate in itself to promise it; in this way, different measurements and determinants of human improvement must be explored by analysts. This examination investigates the effect of outside direct speculation (FDI), human advancement record (HDI) and remote settlement on monetary development in south Asian nations for the time of 1986-2016. Board ARDL test comes about uncover a long-haul connection between FDI, human advancement files and foreign remittance on economy development. In this way, to get ideal outcomes approach producers ought to know about and consider the upsides and downsides of on a few parts of FDI, Human Development list and Economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, about 20 universities in China offer undergraduate courses related to pulp and paper. This large number is congruent with the rapid development of the Chinese pulp and paper industry in the past several decades. In the context of ever-increasing internationalization and global cooperation, English-assisted teaching in Chinese universities has much potential. The wide-spread implementation of English-assisted teaching would promote the career development of students and help foster the advancement of the Chinese pulp and paper industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Soil Science Society of America in 2011, a session was held at its annual meeting to document howthe field has changed over the years. I was asked to give the long-term perspective for soil physics. I surveyed soil-physics research published by the society over the past six years (2005-2011) and compared it with a review done in 1961 upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of the society. Of the 299 papers in my survey, 186 came from outside the USA (62% of the total). Twenty-nine countries were represented with the People's Republic of China having the most papers (27 papers). In the 1961 review, only five countries outside the USA were cited. My survey showed that 48 papers (16%) dealt with water, 35 (12%) with mechanical properties, 19 (6%) with aeration, 18 (6%) with solute transport, 14 (5%) with repellency, and 10 (3%) with temperature. Of the non-USA papers in the survey, 27% gave no source of funding and the other 73% usually cited funding by the government of the corresponding author. Of the USA papers, 47% cited no source of funding. The results showed that soil-physics research has become heavily international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing globalisation, organisations are confronted with intensifying market competition. Consequently, organisations continually implement novel technologies to address the challenges posed by market competition. In business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA) is regarded as a tool or methodology that can automate specific tasks or activities within a business process. RPA is widely employed as a standard solution in various industries to assist enterprises in automating their processes, enhancing their operational efficiency, and reducing operational costs. Nevertheless, it is prudent to consider which processes can be automated by applying RPA and the most appropriate deployment methods for RPA. A literature review reveals that process identification is the optimal method for identifying processes suitable for automation, and three approaches - process mining, process quality-based and interview-based can be considered. There are three principal models for deploying RPA: local, cloud and hybrid. The RPA managers in an organisation are thus able to select the most appropriate deployment option based on the organisation's policies, requirements, and cost considerations. Furthermore, this study identifies the critical success factors (CSFs) and analyses their relationships using a 'why-why' diagram. This study could assist organisations in a more comprehensive understanding of RPA technology, which enables more effective utilisation of RPA for enhanced process management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of water management is continually changing. Water has been subject to external shocks in the form of climate change and globalization. Water management analysis is subject to disciplinary developments and inter-disciplinary interactions. Are these developments well-documented in the literature? Initial observations in the interdisciplinary literature suggest that results are fragmented, implying that a state-of-the-art review is needed. This paper aims to close such a gap by reviewing recent developments in water economics that address increasing perceptions of water scarcity by looking first at changes in the supply and quality of water and then at the impacts of climate change on water supply extremes. Among responses to such challenges, this paper identifies changes to water use patterns by including and co-managing water from different sources, including surface and groundwater, reclaimed wastewater, and desalinated water. Technological advancements are also among the resources that address water challenges. Water challenges are also reflected in the management of internationally shared water. A recent surge in scientific work identified international treaties as a significant contributor to international water management. This paper reviews recently employed economic approaches, such as experimental economics, game theory, institutional economics, and valuation methods. And, finally, it explores modeling approaches, including hydro-economic and computable general equilibrium models, that are being used to deal with water challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of collaborative networks of demographers are relatively scarce. Similar studies in other social sciences provide insight into scholarly trends of both the fields and characteristics of their successful scientists. Exploiting a unique database of metadata for papers presented at six European Population Conferences, this report explores factors explaining research collaboration among demographers. We find that (1) collaboration among demographers has increased over the past 10 years, however, among co-authored papers, collaboration across institutions remains relatively unchanged over the period, (2) papers based on core demographic subfields such as fertility, mortality, migration and data and methods are more likely to involve multiple authors and (3) multiple author teams that are all female are less likely to co-author with colleagues in different institutions. Potential explanations for these results are discussed alongside comparisons with similar studies of collaboration networks in other related social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes trends and possible future developments in global wood-product markets and discusses implications for the Swedish forest sector. Four possible futures, or scenarios, are considered, based on qualitative scenario analysis. The scenarios are distinguished principally by divergent futures with respect to two highly influential factors driving change in global wood-product markets, whose future development is unpredictable. These so-called critical uncertainties were found to be degrees to which: (i) current patterns of globalization will continue, or be replaced by regionalism, and (ii) concern about the environment, particularly climate change, related policy initiatives and customer preferences, will materialize. The overall future of the Swedish solid wood-product industry looks bright, irrespective of which of the four possible futures occurs, provided it accommodates the expected growth in demand for factory-made, energy-efficient construction components. The prospects for the pulp and paper industry in Sweden appear more ambiguous. Globalization is increasingly shifting production and consumption to the Southern hemisphere, adversely affecting employment and forest owners in Sweden. Further, technical progress in information and communication technology (ICT) is expected to lead to drastic reductions in demand for newsprint and printing paper. Chemical pulp producers may profit from a growing bio-energy industry, since they could manufacture new, high-value products in integrated bio-refineries. Mechanical pulp producers cannot do this, however, and might suffer from higher prices for raw materials and electricity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about financial globalization, corporate governance, and the development of home bias is presented. The author presents an overview of optimal ownership theory and its approach, an examination of what home bias is, as well as the incremental insights gained from this conference paper.

Purpose: Given the context of the Coronavirus pandemic, the purpose of this research is to find out what the future of entrepreneurship will look like. We want to find out which direction the entrepreneurs will go. Design / methodology / approach: We conducted an opinion poll on the trends that will follow in entrepreneurship. The questionnaire had only one question: What do you think will be the future trends in entrepreneurship after the Coronavirus pandemic? Findings: Following the study we found that the first 3 places are freelancing, online entrepreneurship and business globalization that will follow the trend in entrepreneurship. Practical implications: This research comes in support of entrepreneurs regarding new trends to have a successful business.

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)