Classifying European cigarette consumption trajectories from 1970 to 2015

ObjectivesTo systematically code and classify longitudinal cigarette consumption trajectories in European countries since 1970.DesignBlinded duplicate qualitative coding of periods of year-over-year relative increase, plateau, and decrease of national per capita cigarette consumption and categorisation of historical cigarette consumption trajectories based on longitudinal patterns emerging from the data.Setting41 countries or former countries in the European region for which data are available between 1970 and 2015.ResultsRegional trends in longitudinal consumption patterns identify stable or decreasing consumption throughout Northern, Western and Southern European countries, while Eastern and Southeastern European countries experienced much greater instability. The 11 emergent classes of historical cigarette consumption trajectories were also regionally clustered, including a distinctive inverted U or sine wave pattern repeatedly emerging from former Soviet and Southeastern European countries.ConclusionsThe open-access data produced by this study can be used to conduct comparative international evaluations of tobacco control policies by separating impacts likely attributable to gradual long-term trends from those more likely attributable to acute short-term events. The complex, regionally clustered historical trajectories of cigarette consumption in Europe suggest that the enduring normative frame of a gently sloping downward curve in cigarette consumption can offer a false sense of security among policymakers and can distract from plausible causal mechanisms among researchers. These multilevel and multisectoral causal mechanisms point to the need for a greater understanding of the political economy of regional and global determinants of cigarette consumption.

Building Theories-in-Practice on Social Innovation in Disability Nonprofit Organizations

This chapter discusses the key theoretical and empirical steps undertaken throughout the authors' previous-but-related mixed methods studies on social innovation in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the Australian disability sector with the aim of using the key findings of these studies to develop ‘theories-in-practice' in disability NPOs. In this chapter, the authors summarize the associated theory-building processes deployed to explain how disability NPOs develop and implement social innovations and the societal ‘system-level' impacts of such innovations. These theory-building processes involve two broad phases, and the culmination of these phases (grounded in the abductive logics of inquiry, complexity theorizing, and set-theoretic methods) leads to the development of several ‘theories-to-practice' that not only convey the interactivity of contextual causal mechanisms leading to social innovation by NPOs, but also outline change-oriented solutions for managers who are working to address complex social challenges.

Social innovation for modified consumption by means of the school subject Art and crafts

In this paper I will take a look at how one can facilitate the change in consumption through social inno­vation, based on the subject of art and design in Norwegian general education. This paper will give a presentation of books, featured relevant articles and formal documents put into context to identify different causal mechanisms around our consumption. The discussion will be anchored around the resources and condition that must be provided to achieve and identify opportunities for action under the subject of Art and crafts, a subject in Norwegian general education with designing at the core of the subject, ages 6–16. The question that this paper points toward is: How can we, based on the subject of Art and crafts in primary schools, facilitate the change in consumption through social innovation?

Just one Damned Thing After Another: Towards an Event-based Perspective of Entrepreneurship

Although events such as the global financial crisis, natural disasters, or the COVID-19 pandemic have large impacts on entrepreneurship, the literature lacks a differentiated analysis of such events. This editorial highlights the importance of events which are discrete and bounded in space and time, unexpected, and strong enough to produce change that can lead to subsequent events. An event based approach is well suited to integrate context and time to predict entrepreneurial activity. We provide a more systematic description of events, their characteristics, and causal mechanisms to allow more holistic and generalizable analysis of the role of events in entrepreneurship.

Mediation: Causal Mechanisms in Business and Management

Mediation refers to causation. Tests for mediation are common in business, management, and related fields. In the simplest mediation model, a researcher asserts that a treatment causes a mediator and that the mediator causes an outcome. For example, a practitioner might examine whether diversity training increases awareness of stereotypes, which, in turn, improves inclusive climate perceptions. Because mediation inferences are causal inferences, it is important to demonstrate that the cause actually precedes the effect, the cause and effect covary, and rival explanations for the causal effect can be ruled out. Although various experimental designs for testing mediation hypotheses are available, single randomized experiments and two randomized experiments provide the strongest evidence for inferring mediation compared with nonexperimental designs, where selection bias and a multitude of confounding variables can make causal interpretations difficult. In addition to experimental designs, traditional statistical approaches for testing mediation include causal steps, difference in coefficients, and product of coefficients. Of the traditional approaches, the causal steps method tends to have low statistical power; the product of coefficients method tends to provide adequate power. Bootstrapping can improve the performance of these tests for mediation. The general causal mediation framework offers a modern approach to testing for causal mechanisms. The general causal mediation framework is flexible. The treatment, mediator, and outcome can be categorical or continuous. The general framework not only incorporates experimental designs (e.g., single randomized experiments, two randomized experiments) but also allows for a variety of statistical models and complex functional forms.

The Real Cost of Surveillance Capitalism: Digital Humanism in the United States and Europe

Shoshana Zuboff’s international best seller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power, has rightfully alarmed citizens of free societies about the uses and misuses of their personal data. Yet the concept of surveillance capitalism, from a global perspective, ultimately obscures more than it reveals. The real threat to liberal democracies is not capitalism but the growing inequalities that corporate surveillance in its unfettered form both reveals and exacerbates. By unclearly specifying the causal mechanisms of the very real negative costs she identifies, Zuboff creates the impression that capitalism itself is the culprit, when the real source of the problem is the absence of good governance.