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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence that volunteering before medical school with older people in a care home has on the perceptions of older people.

Eight medical students answered an anonymous questionnaire relating to their experiences of volunteering in a care home before medical school. This was combined with an analysis of the relevant literature.

All the students had initially volunteered to enhance their CV for medical school. After volunteering, they had a greater realisation of the variety of older people. They also gained a number of transferable skills related to communicating with older people, especially those with cognitive impairment. The greatest learning experience was around the issues to do with dementia.

The research is based on eight students although they were from different areas.

It would be beneficial if care homes could be more proactive in encouraging prospective medical students to volunteer. Medical schools could also provide clearer advice or take a more active stance such as encouraging prospective students to volunteer with older people. Further research should be with a larger sample to gain insight into varying perspectives. It would also be useful to conduct research into older adults’ attitudes towards the contribution of potential medical students to their own lives and to the home.

Volunteering before medical school should be encouraged as it will enhance the chances of getting a place as well as being an eye opening experience and equip them with lifelong skills.

Original.

This paper aims to explore the effect of interlocking directorates on agency conflicts and corporate performance in the shipping industry.

The authors use social network analysis to discover central nodes in the network of personal and corporate connections in an international sample of 110 listed shipping companies.

Assessing network structure, the authors find that the network of corporate leaders is denser than the network of shipping companies. The network of shipping companies is populated with many isolated nodes; the network of shipping executives and directors is populated with many cohesive groups in which the longest distance between two corporate leaders is two companies. The authors find that interlocking corporate leadership can help resolve agency conflicts in the shipping industry, bearing a negative effect on the magnitude of agency costs. The extent of leadership overlaps is associated with board size, financial leverage and profitability. The relationship between profits and interlocks is bidirectional, implying that interlocking directorates bear a positive effect on asset returns.

The authors map the relational structures in the social networks of companies and company leaders in the shipping industry and discover the cross-sectional determinants of interlocks in the shipping industry. The finding about the effect of interlocks on profitability and agency costs bears policy implications for the design of corporate governance in the shipping industry.

The purpose of microcredit is to offer small loans to people who are not covered by traditional financial channels. It can facilitate entrepreneurship, boosting local socio-economic development and improving environmental and political factors.

This paper aims to analyse microcredit in Italy, focusing on a project based in Rione Sanità, Naples. Rione Sanità is one of the poorest areas of Southern Italy, displaying high rates of criminality and unemployment, especially among youth, women, migrants and the vulnerable. The district is renowned for its fine and ancient handicrafts, food, trade and historical heritage – potential drivers for boosting tourism in the area. Qualitative methodologies were used to collect primary data through field visits and interviews with project bankers, local businesses, artisans, associations and religious representatives, project volunteers, as well as participation at local meetings. These data were corroborated by budget analysis based on the project's accounting.

The study shows encouraging results for the project and policy prospects. Despite the tiny starting numbers, there emerges a significant potential for microcredit to spread in the district, as in Southern Italy, providing an effective strategy to combat unemployment, usury and criminality, yielding community development and favoring broad societal challenges.

With this evidence, the paper attempts to shed some light and verify the potential of microfinance projects as a driver of sustainable development and ethical finance in poor areas of developed countries.

Social media stage online patterns of social interaction that differ remarkably from ordinary forms of acting, talking and relating. To unravel these differences, we review the literature on micro-sociology and social psychology and derive a shorthand version of socially-embedded forms of interaction. We use that version as a yardstick for reconstructing and assessing the patterns of sociality social media promote. Our analysis shows that social media platforms stage highly stylized forms of social interaction such as liking, following, tagging, etc. that essentially serve the purpose of generating a calculable and machine-readable data footprint out of user platform participation. This online stylization of social interaction and the data it procures are, however, only the first steps of what we call the infrastructuring of social media. Social media use the data footprint that results from the stylization of social interaction to derive larger (and commercially relevant) social entities such as audiences, networks and groups that are constantly fed back to individuals and groups of users as personalized recommendations of one form or another. Social media infrastructure sociality as they provide the backstage operations and technological facilities out of which new habits and modes of social relatedness emerge and diffuse across the social fabric.

There is a desire to improve economies as a way to solve social inequities while simultaneously addressing the issue of sustainability. Young and Tilley developed a model that describes a sustainability entrepreneur. The purpose of this paper is to apply the model in the Philippine setting to determine if there exists a special entrepreneur who looks beyond profit motivations, considers social inequities, and looks towards future generations.

The paper used the narrative approach in learning more about the motivations and sustainability practices of two Filipino entrepreneurs. The objective was not to compare the practices of both but to match it with the 12 elements of the sustainability entrepreneur model of Young and Tilley.

The concept of sustainability entrepreneurship is unknown to the two entrepreneurs. Yet, both engaged in sustainable business practices, meant to improve living conditions of marginalized groups. However, while they have actually helped communities to take better control of their livelihood, they have not yet consciously imbibed the element of futurity.

The paper attempts to further the model of Young and Tilley. However, since the measurement of sustainable entrepreneurship is not definitive, the researcher used pseudo-measures.

Informing entrepreneurs of the value of sustainability entrepreneurship, may lead to more for-profit enterprises to consider the effects of their business practices on the future of marginalized group and the environment.

There is no publication yet that has applied the Young and Tilley model. This paper shows that the model may have practical implications for entrepreneurs.

This chapter first examines evidence concerning departures of the four flights out of Boston, D.C., and Newark, including identifications of the aircrafts involved, some evidence regarding the flight paths, and then the hijackings. Alleged video evidence at airports for the hijackers themselves is examined, but found to be unacceptable.

The fact of a conspiracy is uncontested by all. Three alternative conspiracy possibilities regarding the planes are examined: the ‘official’ one of suicide hijackers skillfully guiding planes with steeled determination into targets (independent of the hijackers’ identities); use of beaconing or electronic control, similar to ordinary commercial landings, into the targets; and use of ‘drone’ airplanes. The third alternative is not supportable at this time, but the other two are possible explanations, not necessarily equally likely.

The issue of insider trading before 9-11 is addressed. Publicly available data from OptionMetrics are provided and analyzed, indicating that many early reports were not using accurate data. Turning to an academic study in the Journal of Business which relies upon confidential, superior data, the findings are summarized that, indeed, there is evidence of insider trading before 9-11 on American Airlines and United Airlines. Larger concerns of insider trading are also summarized. Lastly, we give brief consideration to the profits certain capitalists make out of 9-11.

Most past studies on studentsʼ entrepreneurial intention tend to focus on the phenomenon in developed countries.There is limited research on entrepreneurial intention of university students from developing nations. This article intends to close this gap by providing some insights into students℉ entrepreneurial inclination in a developing country, Malaysia. A total of 234 students from three faculties at both graduate and undergraduate levels were surveyed to examine their entrepreneurial inclination and also to examine the relationship between their demographic and social characteristics with entrepreneurial inclination.The study found strong entrepreneurial inclination among the students. Significant difference was found between students studying part time and full time and their entrepreneurial inclination. Significant difference was also found between the type of program enrolled in and students℉ entrepreneurial inclination. Further analysis and other findings were reported and recommendation for future research are been put forth in this article.

This paper combines the literature on knowledge transfer and that on organizational behavior to analyze how perceived empowerment and perceived engagement affect knowledge transfer offices’ (KTOs’) performance, measured in terms of the number of license agreements.

The authors measured the cognitions which constitute perceived empowerment and perceived engagement through a survey sent to Italian KTOs’ professionals. The authors performed “fuzzy set qualitative analysis” to investigate if this cognition, together or in isolation, may influence KTOs’ management performance, measured by the number of license agreements.

The results highlight the role of individual cognitions in influencing KTOs’ performance. Furthermore, an important finding from the analysis of the main configurations is that the co-presence of perceived engagement and perceived empowerment leads to more license agreements only in the presence of specific individual cognitions. More precisely, the level of organizational citizenship behavior, the degree to which an individual influences results at work (degree of impact) and the value of a work goal (degree of meaning) are the cognitions which lead to a higher number of license agreements.

Despite the growing interest in the investigation of the determinants of KTOs’ performance, a relevant research gap still concerns the explanation of KTOs’ performance considering individual cognitions such as attitudes, norms, perceived behavioral control and intentions. This study looks at the combined effect of the individual cognition of perceived engagement and perceived empowerment on KTOs’ performances.