Individuals and Institutions

Chapter 1 provides a theoretical framework for understanding African women’s experiences within the broader scholarship on women in politics. The chapter discusses, in three stages, the choices African women must make as they aspire to candidacy, campaign in elections, and govern in office. For each stage, the authors review central theories in the literature on women’s representation and discuss how related hypotheses are upheld or contradicted by emerging evidence from African countries. These overviews highlight common empirical findings as well as specific contradictions across the eight countries examined in the book—Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Uganda, and Zambia. The chapter also provides a concise description of each empirical chapter’s core findings with an emphasis on how individual attributes (e.g., professional background, financial autonomy, organizational ties) and institutional structures (e.g., political parties, electoral systems, media organizations, patronage politics) interact to impinge on African women’s political trajectories.

Transatlantic Radicalism

The Atlantic Ocean not only connected North and South America with Europe through trade but also provided the means for an exchange of knowledge and ideas, including political radicalism. Socialists and anarchists would use this “radical ocean” to escape state prosecution in their home countries and establish radical milieus abroad. However, this was often a rather unorganized development and therefore the connections that existed were quite diverse. The movement of individuals led to the establishment of organizational ties and the import and exchange of political publications between Europe and the Americas. The main aim of this book is to show how the transatlantic networks of political radicalism evolved with regard to socialist and anarchist milieus and in particular to look at the actors within the relevant processes—topics that have so far been neglected in the major histories of transnational political radicalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Individual case studies are examined within a wider context to show how networks were actually created, how they functioned and their impact on the broader history of the radical Atlantic.

Transatlantic Radicalism

This chapter introduced key problems related to rather understudied ties between radicals in their European, American, and thereby transatlantic contexts. It tries to highlight the issues individuals faced with regard to the genesis and the later use of existent networks of transnational radicalism. Furthermore, the introduction highlights the structure of the book that will in the first part focus on organizational ties of radical political parties as well as press networks that connected Europe with the Americas (ch. 2-5). The second part then discusses the roles of individuals who acted as mediators between the two continents in many different ways (ch. 6-10).

Change in Service Provision Networks: The Case of Animal Welfare Services

This research focuses on change within informal service provision networks, specifically examining the impact that changes within a key organization can have on the larger network. Employing a before and after survey design with a treatment at the midpoint and participant observation, it asks: What is the impact of a major change within one organization on the larger external network? What is the nature of the organizational ties? and, How do political factors exogenous to the network impact the network evolution process? The findings suggest that internal change within a focal actor can have ripple effects throughout the network increasing density. Public service provision at the local level can be enhanced through an increase in partnerships between the public and nonprofit sectors. However, network evolution can be limited by the larger political environment and lack of a coordinating role on the part of local government.

A Flying Threat Coming to Sahel and East Africa? A Brief Review

Non-state actors have been experimenting with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for two decades. This has become widely known over the 5 years, as both ISIS and the Houthis have adapted weaponized UAVs into their repertoires. As the Sahel and East Africa regions experience a rise in violence from non-state actors, and given that groups here are affiliated with groups in the Middle East, this paper seeks to explore the possibility and likelihood of weaponized UAVs being used on the battlefield in these regions. By utilizing both scholarly work and other reporting from these regions, this paper finds that there is a low risk of weaponized UAVs being adapted in these regions through organizational ties to groups in the Middle East. However, as UAVs are commercially available all over the world, groups with bomb-making experience and technical know-how in general may themselves develop local variations and adaptions of what Jihadist groups have done in the Middle East over the last decade.

From Applied Research to Participatory Action, Part II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Community Dialogues and Rediscovering Our Communities

In this article, we relay our collaboration as part of a community-based, participatory action project involving Spanish-speaking community leaders, an anthropologist, and university students in San José, California. Building from earlier collaborations to support community-based leadership, we employed focus group methods in a collaborative project to facilitate community dialogues to identify salient issues for community and leader attention. By recognizing community members as agents (rather than targets) of change and interventions, we wanted to respect and reinforce local adaptive and creative capacities. We therefore endeavored to support participants as they activated their social networks and organizational ties to initiate dialogues and build actionable agendas.

Determination of features of development of modern theories of management

The object of research is the processes of development of modern management theories. One of the next problematic aspects is the identification of the peculiarities of the development of modern management theory in the period of digitalization and pandemic, which means a significant impact on the economy. In the process of work general scientific methods were used: induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, comparison, systematization. The analysis of scientific approaches to the definition of management is carried out; the main essential features of modern enterprises and management theories, respectively, are determined. It is determined that the theory of management at the present level undergoes significant transformations. In modern theories more and more attention is paid to: the intangible component and the peculiarities of its management; there is an active transition to digital technologies and digitalization of business; there is a need to use new management methods; organizational structures and corporate cultures are changing. This in turn contributes to the purposeful formation and development of such institutions within the organization as: – trust and creative atmosphere of productive group work; – development of organizational ties within the organization and outside it; – development of innovative ability of the company’s staff; – use of experience of other organizations. Based on the analysis, the following features of modern management theories are identified: – in modern theories more and more attention is paid to the intangible component and the peculiarities of its management; – active transition to digital technologies and digitalization of business; – change in the subject of work in most employees, in particular, the transition to advanced information and communication technologies; – the need to use new management methods; – transformation of organizational structures and corporate cultures. This provides the possibility of effective modern management by planning the activities of the firm in the short, medium and long term, as well as obtaining the maximum possible profit with minimal costs in a rapidly changing environment.

Search and development by Soviet forces of Ukrainian nationalists on the territory of the Romanian People’s Republic (1955–1957)

The article is an attempt to disclose an unknown aspect, namely, the work of the Soviet special services on revealing, investigating, and detention of former participants of the OUN and UPA in the territory of Romanian national republic. In the article, it is established that despite the struggle against the liberation movement in the 1940s and 1950s, the Soviet authorities failed to eradicate and suppress anti-Soviet sentiments completely. The confrontation between Ukrainian nationalists and the Soviet administration continued not only in the USSR, but also abroad and even after the official report on the liquidation of organized nationalist structures. At the same time, in connection with the liberalization of the socio-political regime (de-Stalinization, “vidlyha” (“thaw”), rehabilitation of prisoners) intensified the activities of hostile to power –mostly former members of the OUN and URA (both those who remained underground and released from imprisonment), as well as representatives of religious associations. That is why the tasks of the law enforcement agencies included not only the suppression of opposition resistance in the USSR, but also the search for and elimination of all former underground fighters, especially leaders who were in other countries, including Romania. The repressive and punitive bodies carried out work on the search for nationalists in the Romanian People’s Republic in several directions: 1) development of family, former organizational ties of OUN leaders who crossed the border at different times and joined various OUN foreign organizations and centers; 2) intensification of the search for OUN leaders abroad, detection and interception of probably existing channels of their connections with the remnants of the OUN in Bukovyna and its use for operational purposes; 3) intensification of the search for underground fighters and the development of well-known OUN members who were on the operational register; 4) organization of intelligence and operational work among those who were legalized and appeared guilty, former underground fighters, members of the OUN, as well as the development of those who did not surrender their weapons and legalized on the instructions of the underground, as well as returnees from prison and did not renounce their previous views; 5) intensification of the development of Ukrainian nationalists who were on the operational register or in the legal units of the OUN; 6) recruiting new and increasing the efficiency of the existing agency (which worked with special tasks to intercept existing communication channels developed by the security forces of the OUN and foreign OUN centers). As potentially dangerous the Soviet system considered even those nationalists who had emigrated abroad, therefore, after the liquidation of the Ukrainian organized resistance movement, they were perpetually search for. Hence, after the revealing of such persons, who most often were former heads and members of the nationalist underground of Chernivtsi region, a detailed plan of their investigation was made. A leading role in this process was played by the secret service agents who carried out the most difficult operative combinations of the Soviet law enforcement bodies. The well arranged – since the 1940s cooperation between the USSR law enforcement bodies and the Romanian national republic assisted in the effective search, investigation, and arrests of the Ukrainian nationalists.

FEATURES OF FORMATION OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES OF THE SERVICE ENTERPRISE IN THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

The high level of the development of information and telecommunication technologies has led to the acceleration of the processes of introduction and dissemination, copying by competitors of new knowledge-intensive technologies and other scientific developments. In these conditions, the enterprise's competitive advantages are determined by its uniqueness in a competitive environment and are formed on the basis of internal hard-to-imitate intangible resources and key areas of competence, which becomes a source of sustainable competitive advantages of the enterprise.The features of the formation of competitive advantages of an enterprise in the service sector in the context of the transition to a knowledge economy – from general approaches of strategic management, resource theory – to a competency-based approach are investigated. The key postulates of the competence-based approach to the formation of competitive advantages of a service sector enterprise in the transition to a knowledge economy are identified.It has been substantiated that the competitive advantages of an enterprise in the service sector are based on the enterprise's key areas of competence, which are a unique set of assets of knowledge, experience and organizational ties, which, in combination with resources and technologies, are embodied in the creation of new processes, products and services with new consumer properties. Key areas of competence are knowledge assets and are formed on the basis of a combination of knowledge and organizational ties that is unique for each enterprise, which leads to the need to identify such assets, order them and evaluate them in order to determine the uniqueness of the key areas of competence of the enterprise. For this purpose, the general scheme for identifying knowledge resources that form the competitive advantages of a service sector enterprise have been proposed in the article.