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Information and communications technology (ICT) offers enormous opportunities for individuals, businesses and society. The application of ICT is equally important to economic and non-economic activities. Researchers have increasingly focused on the adoption and use of ICT by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as the economic development of a country is largely dependent on them. Following the success of ICT utilisation in SMEs in developed countries, many developing countries are looking to utilise the potential of the technology to develop SMEs. Past studies have shown that the contribution of ICT to the performance of SMEs is not clear and certain. Thus, it is crucial to determine the effectiveness of ICT in generating firm performance since this has implications for SMEs’ expenditure on the technology. This research examines the diffusion of ICT among SMEs with respect to the typical stages from innovation adoption to post-adoption, by analysing the actual usage of ICT and value creation. The mediating effects of integration and utilisation on SME performance are also studied. Grounded in the innovation diffusion literature, institutional theory and resource-based theory, this study has developed a comprehensive integrated research model focused on the research objectives. Following a positivist research paradigm, this study employs a mixed-method research approach. A preliminary conceptual framework is developed through an extensive literature review and is refined by results from an in-depth field study. During the field study, a total of 11 SME owners or decision-makers were interviewed. The recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed using NVivo 10 to refine the model to develop the research hypotheses. The final research model is composed of 30 first-order and five higher-order constructs which involve both reflective and formative measures. Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is employed to test the theoretical model with a cross-sectional data set of 282 SMEs in Bangladesh. Survey data were collected using a structured questionnaire issued to SMEs selected by applying a stratified random sampling technique. The structural equation modelling utilises a two-step procedure of data analysis. Prior to estimating the structural model, the measurement model is examined for construct validity of the study variables (i.e. convergent and discriminant validity).

The estimates show cognitive evaluation as an important antecedent for expectation which is shaped primarily by the entrepreneurs’ beliefs (perception) and also influenced by the owners’ innovativeness and culture. Culture further influences expectation. The study finds that facilitating condition, environmental pressure and country readiness are important antecedents of expectation and ICT use. The results also reveal that integration and the degree of ICT utilisation significantly affect SMEs’ performance. Surprisingly, the findings do not reveal any significant impact of ICT usage on performance which apparently suggests the possibility of the ICT productivity paradox. However, the analysis finally proves the non-existence of the paradox by demonstrating the mediating role of ICT integration and degree of utilisation explain the influence of information technology (IT) usage on firm performance which is consistent with the resource-based theory. The results suggest that the use of ICT can enhance SMEs’ performance if the technology is integrated and properly utilised. SME owners or managers, interested stakeholders and policy makers may follow the study’s outcomes and focus on ICT integration and degree of utilisation with a view to attaining superior organisational performance.

This study urges concerned business enterprises and government to look at the environmental and cultural factors with a view to achieving ICT usage success in terms of enhanced firm performance. In particular, improving organisational practices and procedures by eliminating the traditional power distance inside organisations and implementing necessary rules and regulations are important actions for managing environmental and cultural uncertainties. The application of a Bengali user interface may help to ensure the productivity of ICT use by SMEs in Bangladesh. Establishing a favourable national technology infrastructure and legal environment may contribute positively to improving the overall situation. This study also suggests some changes and modifications in the country’s existing policies and strategies. The government and policy makers should undertake mass promotional programs to disseminate information about the various uses of computers and their contribution in developing better organisational performance. Organising specialised training programs for SME capacity building may succeed in attaining the motivation for SMEs to use ICT. Ensuring easy access to the technology by providing loans, grants and subsidies is important. Various stakeholders, partners and related organisations should come forward to support government policies and priorities in order to ensure the productive use of ICT among SMEs which finally will help to foster Bangladesh’s economic development.

A central tenet of Progressive era responses to prostitution was the alleged over-representation of white, US-born daughters of foreign parentage in the prostitution population. We detail a statistical error in an influential 1913 study from the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford as an important source of this tenet. Using archival data to more accurately reconstruct the Reformatory population, we find that Black women constituted the only over-represented group, but were all but ignored by reformers. We foreground how ideas about race and immigration informed the social response to prostitution in this period, highlighting the importance of critically analyzing historical sources.

Role-taking, perspective taking, and empathy have developed through parallel literatures in sociology and psychology. All three concepts address the ways that people attune the self to others’ thoughts and feelings. Despite conceptual and operational overlap, researchers have yet to synthesize existing research across the three concepts. We undertake the task of theoretical synthesis, constructing a model in which role-taking emerges as a multidimensional process that includes perspective taking and empathy as component parts.

We review the literatures on role-taking, perspective taking, and empathy across disciplines. Focusing on definitions, measures, and interventions, we discern how the concepts overlap, how they are distinct, and how they work together in theoretically meaningful ways.

The review identifies two key axes on which each concept varies: the relative roles of affect and cognition, and the relative emphasis on self and structure. The review highlights the cognitive nature of perspective taking, the affective nature of empathy, and the structural nature of role-taking. In a move toward theoretical synthesis, we propose a definition that centers role-taking as a sociological construct, with perspective taking and empathy representing cognition and affect, respectively.

Role-taking is an important part of selfhood and community social life. It is a skill that varies in patterned ways, including along lines of status and power. Theoretical synthesis clarifies the process of role-taking and fosters the construction of effective interventions aimed at equalizing role-taking in interpersonal interaction.

The text explores the feminist concept of intersectionality and its adoption within disability studies. The aim is to analyze how feminist and disability movements and theories have managed the issue of struggling against oppression and for equality while acknowledging internal diversity.

Literature review based on the concepts of intersectionality, disabled women, and disability and diversity seeking for explicit and implicit confluences and emerging implications at different levels: social movements, theoretical developments, and policymaking.

Intersectionality is a minor field within disability studies. However, diversity and multiple oppression issues have been addressed by the disability rights movement, after disabled women introduced feminist principles. This intersection of disability and feminist studies has transformed both fields, and at the same time fostered a new paradigm. It situates the claims on the similarities between disabled and nondisabled people, instead of focusing on identity politics.

The chapter acknowledges social movements as key actors in generating and developing significant debates, both in feminist and disability studies. Moreover, it seeks for conceptual tools that promote alliance-building strategies between oppressed groups in the struggle for social justice.

The chapter presents overall perspective of what intersectionality is and how the disability rights movement has addressed it, while seeking broader implications of the analysis of multiple inequalities.

Timothy Davis has produced a well researched, well written and scholarly piece of work that merits serious attention by historians of economic thought. His principal aim is to reassess Ricardo's credentials as an “applied economist,” and to that end he devotes a couple of very useful chapters to a blow-by-blow account of the UK's turbulent economic history between 1815 and 1825, four chapters to Ricardo and, also usefully, a series of appendices relating to the vital economic statistics of the period. The Ricardo that emerges from this study is (almost) a paragon of “applied virtue.” Ricardo was, we are told (repeatedly), fully conversant with the available empirical evidence, his writings were directed to concrete economic problems (except for the Principles, apparently) and, most importantly of all, his empirical analysis was “exemplary” and fully “validated” by events. The only real blemish was his law-of-markets based assumption of full employment at a time of general economic “distress,” leading him to reject all proposals for “relief works,” which Davis finds “particularly unsatisfactory” and “remarkable” (he might well have said “inexplicable”) in view of Ricardo's (supposedly) keen appreciation of economic reality. All in all, however, Ricardo's “applied” credentials are rather impressive.

The monograph argues that American racism has two colours (white and black), not one; and that each racism dresses itself not in one clothing, but in four: (1) “Minimal” negative, when one race considers another race inferior to itself in degree, but not in nature; (2) “Maximal” negative, when one race regards another as inherently inferior; (3) “Minimal” positive, when one race elevates another race to a superior status in degree, but not in nature; and (4) “Maximal” positive, when one race believes that the other race is genetically superior. The monograph maintains that the needs of capitalism created black slavery; that black slavery produced white racism as a justification for black slavery; and that black racism is a backlash of white racism. The monograph concludes that the abolition of black slavery and the civil rights movement destroyed the social and political ground for white and black racism, while the modern development of capitalism is demolishing their economic and intellectual ground.

This paper explores the emergence and coordination of synchrony in networked groups like those that develop integrated product platforms in collaborative ecosystems. While synchronized actions are an important objective for many groups, interorganizational network theory has yet to explore synchrony in depth perhaps because it does not fit the typical diffusion models this research relies upon. By adding organizationally realistic features – sparse network structure and intentional coordination – to the firefly model from theoretical biology, I take some first steps in understanding synchrony in organizational groups. Like diffusion, synchrony is more effective in denser networks, but unlike diffusion clustering decelerates synchrony’s emergence. Coordination by a few group members accelerates group-wide synchrony, and benefits the coordinating organizations with a higher likelihood that it converges to the coordinating organization’s preferred rhythm. This likelihood of convergence to an organization’s preferred rhythm – what I term synchrony performance – increases in denser networks, but is not dependent on tie strength and clustering.

Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm – a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, the authors investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations.

Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator's thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. The authors supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions.

Participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse.

This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.