In his article "World Literatures and Romanian Literary Criticism" Caius Dobrescu argues that the notion Weltliteratur of Goethe posits the concept of world literature as the conveyor of universal (i.e., cosmopolitan) skills of socio-cultural adaptation. The influence of this form of Weltliteratur on Romanian literary criticism is traceable from Westernization in the nineteenth century to the c...

We develop a dynamic model of sustainable competitive advantage in hypercompetitive environments. We argue that competitive advantages of firms can be sustainable even if resource-based advantages of firms can be quickly replicated by rivals or when the barriers to entry are almost non-existent. This is accomplished through intensive entrepreneurial activity of firms during the equilibrating te...

1. When customers call in, their orders and credit card information are received by the customer service department. 2. Once the order is received, the order details and credit card information is sent to the Finance department for processing. 3. If the credit card authorization is unsuccessful, then the Finance department sends a “rejection” notification to the Customer Service department. 4. ...

In ecommerce, many market followers would like to have personalization systems in place to more effectively compete with market leaders. However, retailers face a significant challenge in forming initial trust with new customers, especially when the new customers are culturally diverse. Acknowledging this dilemma, this study examines the moderating cultural effects of espoused individualism/col...

Current work suggests that individualistic values are more likely to be invoked in judgments about welfare recipients when the latter are black. Nevertheless, this “racialization” hypothesis has yet to be directly tested by looking at whether generalized individualism is more strongly related to hostility toward welfare recipients among whites when the recipients are black. In this paper, I con...

The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims – explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individu...

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Soci...

BACKGROUND The stepped wedge cluster randomised trial (SW-CRT) is increasingly being used to evaluate policy or service delivery interventions. However, there is a dearth of trials literature addressing analytical approaches to the SW-CRT. Perhaps as a result, a significant number of published trials have major methodological shortcomings, including failure to adjust for secular trends at the a...

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate self-criticism as a potential mediating factor in the link between mother-adolescent relationships with aggression and perceptions of social competence. The sample consisted of 888 older (M = 14.3 years) and younger (M = 11.6 years) adolescent children from the same family. Maternal self-criticism strongly corresponded to the quality of r...

OBJECTIVES When things go wrong for people they can become self-critical or focus on positive, reassuring aspects of the self. This study explored the relationship between forms of self-criticism and self-reassurance, recall of parental experiences and attachment style in relation to depressed symptoms in students. METHODS A sample of 197 undergraduate students from the UK and Canada complete...