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Corporate Social Responsibility of SMEs during Times of Turbulence : - A Case Study of Small and Medium-sized Exporters in a Changing EnvironmentPettersson, Kristofer, Stylianos, Papaioannou January 2012 (has links)
The increased globalization has brought increased interdependency between countries as well as markets. The 2007 financial crisis impacted companies on a global scale and the need for companies to be socially responsible has increased. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can build reputation and lead to societal and competitive advantage, which can be especially useful for small and medium sized enterprises (SME) with limited resources. CSR has traditionally been the domain of multinational corporations and little is known about CSR in SMEs. Recent research shows mixed results of how the financial crisis has affected CSR strategies. The purpose of this study is to explore how stakeholders‟ issues and CSR strategies change during times of market turbulence and SMEs conform to the changes of the internal and external environment. This was studied through a qualitative case study of three Swedish exporting SMEs and their key stakeholders. Interviews with managing directors of the companies and key stakeholders together with secondary data constitute the gathered empirical data. Key stakeholders, key issues, legitimacy with stakeholders, company matching with the external environment and the CSR strategy, as well as changes during crisis were analyzed based on the empirical data. We found an increased need for CSR activities during times of turbulence. Two companies increased their CSR activities while one decreased the activities. The results of the study indicate that the external environment changes during times of market turbulence and companies need to adapt to the newly shaped environment. CSR activities became more important for some stakeholders during market turbulence. Companies which adapted to the changes of the external environment improved legitimacy with their stakeholders and moved toward enhancing their competitive advantage as well as improved their performance. The study contributes to the knowledge of how SME form CSR strategy as well as how this strategy is changed during times of turbulence. We found CSR strategies of the studied SMEs to be emergent and intuitive, and that CSR strategy changed in a mixed direction during the crisis. Finally, a recommendation is made based on the results. SMEs can strategically use CSR activities in order to develop a competitive advantage through differentiation by a creating societal advantage.
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Investigating the Validity of Observational Study Based on Electronic Medical Records and the Effectiveness of Perioperative Beta-Adrenoceptor Therapy to Reduce Postoperative Cardiac Events in Patients Undergoing Major Non-Cardiac SurgeryAn, Xuebei 24 August 2012 (has links)
No description available.
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Robust strategies to isolate the causal effect of improved fallows on farmer welfare and onfarm environmental quality in ZambiaKuntashula, Elias January 2014 (has links)
This study attempts to explain the inability of resource constrained farmers in Zambia to invest in soil fertility enhancing improved fallows, a sustainable land use practice developed by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in the 1980s. Although several studies in the laboratory and field have shown that improved fallows positively impact on farmers’ welfare, the reliability of such conclusions comes into question given their use of improper identification strategies. Secondly, although there is general consensus that improved fallows additionally co-produce environmental services, the literature acknowledges that such services are not only imprecisely defined but also rarely quantified. Most estimates for environmental services have been confined to controlled field trials and laboratory experiments. Consequently, this research was designed to answer the following questions: 1) Would the use of randomisation procedures to estimate impact provide additional support to the foregone conclusions by most literature regarding the positive impact of improved fallows on farmer welfare? 2) Studies from on-station experiments show that improved fallows provide environmental services; do such conclusions hold for improved fallows planted on-farm where the near ideal experimental conditions are not guaranteed?
A structured questionnaire was used to interview 324 randomly selected small scale farmers in Chongwe district of Zambia between November and December 2011. The data was analysed using well-grounded and robust matching and switching regression counter factual analysis tools.
The rigorous econometric methods confirmed the positive impact of improved fallows on household maize yields, maize productivity, per capita maize yield and maize income. Insignificant impact results were however obtained when broader welfare indicators – overall per capita, crop income and value of crop production were considered. The study attributes these later results to two possible areas; first, most of the maize sold that contributes to crop income may be coming from other input sources such as the inorganic fertiliser that is common in the study area. Second, the non-use of the technology on cash crops (for example cotton) in subsequent periods after a year or two of maize cropping reduces the technology’s contribution to the households’ cash crop income portfolio. Had the study only used maize income or value of maize income to measure overall crop income (or value of crop production), or had it just made a simple comparison between adopters and non adopters, the likelihood of not finding any insignificant results on the efficacy of improved fallows would have been high. The study thus concludes that the use of improved fallows should be diversified to cover the entire cash crop portfolio especially a year or so after maize cropping when most of the nitrogen supplied by technology has been used up. More importantly, the study recommends use of better and more robust methodologies in evaluating impact of interventions.
The positive effects of improved fallows on on-farm environmental quality, controlling for farmers’ biophysical and socio-economic characteristics were confirmed. Estimates from OLS regression, matching and the more robust endogenous switching regression showed that the technology had a significant causal effect on households’ consumption of fuel wood obtained from natural forests. The technology can provide up to 1,086 kg or about 51% of annual household fuel wood requirements in the year the fallows are terminated. This amount is substantial enough to make a positive contribution towards reducing encroachment on public forests and thus control the rate of deforestation. In addition to promoting the technology for soil fertility improvement (the role which is widely accepted by the farmers), explicit extension messages conveying the technology’s capacity to provide various products that contribute to farmer welfare as well as provide on farm environmental quality should be made available. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / lk2014 / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / PhD / Unrestricted
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