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Private Businesses (private + businesses)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

The New Scramble for the African Countryside

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2003
Vupenyu Dzingirai
There is in Africa, as in other parts of the third world, a desire for environmental management that simultaneously incorporates and benefits all stakeholders, including private businesses and villagers. While these partnerships continue to displace the failed state-centric management of the African landscape, research to document their local-level impact is still formative and developing. This article is an attempt to examine the new environmental management partnerships emerging in southern Africa's countryside. It argues that these new interventions not only fail to deliver benefits to villagers: more importantly, they curtail the long-established rights to land and other natural resources of indigenous communities. While villagers may engage in a battle to recover these rights, it is a struggle in which the odds are stacked against them, and which the private sector and its partners are set to win. [source]

Privatize your name: Symbolic work in a post-Soviet linguistic market

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 3 2000
Alexei Yurchak
This paper analyzes the new names given to Russian private businesses that have appeared after the collapse of the Soviet State in 1991. By naming new private ventures their owners members of the new business class attempt to privatize public space not only legally but also symbolically and linguistically. They strive to construct their particular new version of social reality, to represent it as positive and meaningful, and to impose themselves publicly as legitimate authors, owners, and masters of this new reality. This paper proceeds on several distinct levels of analysis. First, it analyzes a number of discourses, representing various subcultures and periods of Soviet and Russian history, from which new business names draw their complex meanings. Second, it considers concrete linguistic and semiotic techniques that are employed by the new names in this process. Third, it examines the cultural and social implications of this process of nomination for post-Soviet developments in the Russian society. [source]

Evaluation policy and evaluation practice

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION, Issue 123 2009
William M. K. Trochim
The author develops the basic idea of evaluation policy, describes a practical model for development and revision of evaluation policies (including a taxonomy, structure, and set of principles), and suggests critical challenges and opportunities for the future of evaluation policy. An evaluation policy is any rule or principle that a group or organization uses to guide its decisions and actions when doing evaluation. Every entity that engages in evaluation, including government agencies, private businesses, and nonprofit organizations, has evaluation policies. Sometimes they are explicit and written; more often they are implicit and ad hoc principles or norms that have simply evolved over time. Evaluation policies profoundly affect the day-to-day work of all evaluators and ultimately the quality of the programs they evaluate. Many recent and current controversies or conflicts in the field of evaluation can be viewed, at least in part, as a struggle around evaluation policy. Because evaluation policies typically apply across multiple evaluations, influencing policies directly may have systemic and far-reaching effects for practice. Evaluation practice must play a critical role in informing and shaping the development of evaluation policies. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

Solutions out of context: Examining the transfer of business concepts to nonprofit organizations

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP, Issue 2 2008
Tammy E. Beck
Small nonprofit organizations face a dilemma when applying management theories and techniques developed for large, private businesses. Research evidence suggests both benefits and problems associated with application of these techniques. To avoid potential problems, nonprofit managers commonly limit the selection and transfer of business techniques to those that solve specific problems or appear consistent with nonprofit orientations. One consequence is that business solutions often create unintended negative outcomes that are due to contextual differences between the two types of organizations. One possible solution to this dilemma is adoption of bundles, or configurations, of practices that introduce important contextual checks and balances along with the specific tools and techniques. We explore this option through a critical, participatory ethnographic analysis of a small nonprofit service organization. [source]

Financing Alternatives for Chinese Small and Medium Enterprises: The Case for a Small and Medium Enterprise Stock Market

CHINA AND WORLD ECONOMY, Issue 1 2007
Hung-gay Fung Dr Y. S. Tsiang Professor
Abstract Financing alternatives for small and medium enterprises in China are discussed in the present study. In particular, we analyze the significant changes and developments in China s "second board" stock market. China s extensive network of regional assets and equity exchanges, which were set up to facilitate private equity transfer, and non-performing loan transactions seem to partially fill the void for small and medium enterprises, which cannot easily obtain approval for listing on the stock exchanges. Foreign investors can identify investment opportunities in non-listed domestic state-owned and private businesses through these regional assets and equity exchanges. At the same time, foreign stock markets are now attracting the young Chinese enterprises to list their stocks on their exchanges. (Edited by Zhinan Zhang) [source]