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Africa after Modernism traces shifts in perspectives on African culture, arts, and philosophy from the conflict with European modernist interventions in the climate of colonialist aggression to present identitarian positions in the climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass media. By focusing on what may be called deconstructive moments in twentieth-century Africanist thought – on intellectual landmarks, revolutionary ideas, crises of consciousness, literary and philosophical debates – this study looks at African modernity and modernism from critical postcolonial perspectives. An effort to sketch contemporary frameworks of global intersubjective relations reflecting African cultures and concerns must resist taking modernism as a term of African periodization, or master-narrative, but as a constellation of discursive and subjective forms that obtains upon the present moment in African literature, philosophy, and cultural history. Africa after Modernism argues for a philosophical consciousness and pan-African multiculturalist ethos that operate, after the deconstruction of Eurocentrism, beyond self/other paradigms of exoticism or West/Africa political ideologies, in dialogue with postcolonial approaches to cultural reciprocity.

Fully revised and updated, the second edition of this authoritative guide is a comprehensive, scholarly and systematic review of modern English. In one volume the book presents a description of both the linguistic structure of present-day English and its geographical, social, gender, and ethnic variations. Covering new developments such as the impact of email on language and corpus-based grammars, this accessible text has been extensively rewritten and brings the survey of modern English right up to date. It also offers new examples and suggestions for further reading.

Background: Facebook ratings provide relevant information and data on hospital quality for individual patients, the hospitals themselves and the institutions responsible for the quality assessment of hospitals. However, there are still considerable doubts in the healthcare sector about the extent to which Facebook ratings can actually be used as a valid instrument or input for the quality assessments of hospitals.Objective: The aim of this study was, on the one hand, to make transparent the extent and representativeness of the coverage of the Swiss hospital sector by Facebook ratings and to show which applications are possible with this data. On the other hand, it pursued the goal of systematically identifying possible biases based on the motivation and behavior of individual users, the decisions of hospitals, and the design of the platform.Methods: We collected empirical data on all hospitals in Switzerland regarding their characteristics and Facebook pages. Furthermore, we collected data on dates, types, and rating scores for all 7,103 Facebook ratings on Swiss hospitals on Facebook between 2013 and 2019. We applied cross-sectional and longitudinal descriptive analyses to explore the characteristics of Facebook ratings and their development during the study period. In addition, we applied robust regression analyses to identify the factors influencing hospitals' decisions to disable the rating feature and their average Facebook rating scores.Results: For 39 (14.2%) of the 274 hospitals finally included in this study, no ratings were possible (no Facebook page or rating feature turned off). A total of 173 hospitals (63.1%) received at least one Facebook rating during the study period. For the remaining 62 hospitals (22.6%), receiving ratings was possible, but they did not receive any. Psychiatric hospitals are more likely to disable the rating feature on their official Facebook pages, whereas birth centers have a very low propensity in this regard. The individual Facebook ratings on hospitals have a J-shaped distribution with a very strong preponderance of top ratings (76.1% 5-star rating scores vs. 6.2% 1-star rating scores). Hospitals with higher patient volumes or psychiatric hospitals tend to have lower average rating scores, whereas hospitals with a higher share of patients with voluntary health insurance or birth centers tend to have higher average rating scores.Conclusions: The representativeness and coverage of the Swiss hospital sector by Facebook ratings are reduced to some extent and the ratings are distorted based on certain biases in the rating behavior of individuals, the decisions of hospitals, and the design of the Facebook platform. Considering the patterns of biases found in this study, Facebook ratings can be used beneficially for certain applications on hospital quality assessments. However, primary use should only be complementary to other commonly used hospital quality assessment tools.

In recent years, crowdfunding has come up as a new way of online fundraising for startups in early stages of their venture foundation. However, beside financial objectives of newly founded ventures, the reward-based variant of crowdfunding can also be applied as a powerful marketing tool for already established small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Nevertheless, so far, little is known about such crowdfunding applications by established SMEs. In this paper, we explore on basis of a multi case study in Switzerland, (1) how SMEs use reward-based crowdfunding campaigns in their marketing mix and (2) what challenges SMEs face when they apply reward-based crowdfunding for marketing purposes. Our findings indicate that reward-based crowdfunding offers established SMEs a comprehensive tool to develop and manage their marketing mix in an adaptive and relationship-oriented manner. However, crowdfunding is also a demanding marketing tool whose successful application in the marketing mix requires a certain level of strategic planning, contemporary marketing capabilities, and a well-coordinated execution of SMEs.

Digital environments surrounding startups provide relevant data and quick feedback responses for them to any variations in content and applications of their digital marketing. This allows them to develop relevant business activities following some kind of experimental trial and error method. In this study a case is described where a German startup followed an experimental method to optimize their application of online videos in digital marketing. Expending “classical” lean startup approaches this paper proposes that experimental methods should be further developed and validated as organizational process models for startups and could be applied for data-based decision making in general.

Relationships and networks are commonly understood to play an important role in firms' internationalization. With this proposition in mind, this paper investigates the link between domestic business-to-business ties and firm internationalization in a sample of 502 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from Switzerland. Following a two-step approach, this paper analyzes how transactional relationships among SMEs and publicly listed domestic companies are linked to the export propensity and export intensity of SMEs. The empirical results reveal the heterogeneous effects of these relationships. Although the domestic business-to-business ties are positively associated with the export propensity of SMEs, they are negatively related to the export intensity of SMEs.

The notion that networks and relationships support young ventures in their further development is well established in organization science and entrepreneurship research. However, so far we still lack deeper insights how relationship portfolios are established by young ventures and how they are further developed to better fit to changes in their external and internal environment. This study elaborates a system of concrete mechanisms influencing the development of young ventures' relationship portfolios by balancing the exploration of (potential) new partners vs. the exploitation of ongoing partnerships. In a further step all mechanisms identified are formalized and integrated into a computational model. A systematic examination of the simulation behavior allows new insights in the interplay of structural, relational and individual factors on the antecedents and consequences of exploration and exploitation in entrepreneurial ventures' relationship portfolios.

German Abstract: Crowdfunding etabliert sich in der Schweiz. Die Erfolgsquoten sind mit 43% jedoch relativ niedrig und das Know-How, wie man eine Kampagne zum Erfolg führt, fehlt oft. Ein wichtiger Faktor ist das richtige Timing. Die besten Wochentage, um in eine Kam-pagne zu starten, sind Montag und Dienstag. Dies zeigt, dass die grundsätzliche Bereitschaft von potentiellen Geldgebern zu Donations am Anfang der Woche am höchsten ist und bis Ende der Woche abnimmt und seinen Tiefpunkt am Samstag erreicht hat. Die höchsten Beträge hingegen werden Freitag und Samstag gegeben. Während der Durchschnitt über alle Projekt bei 128 Franken liegt, ist der Betrag pro Geldgeber am Freitag mit 148 Franken deutlich höher. Insgesamt lässt sich anhand der Kurvenverläufe antizipieren, wie Geldgeber ihre Donation-Aktivitäten in ihren allgemeinen Tagesverlauf einbinden.English Abstract: Funding activities of backers in reward-based crowdfunding vary substantially over the time of a campaign. Although the first days of a campaign appear to be crucial for the trajectory of a campaign, to date no quantitative study has assessed the role of the starting day of the week and how timing during the first days affects the success of a crowdfunding campaign. Drawing on a dataset of 492 projects on the Swiss crowdfunding platform 100-days.net, we analyse the underlying dynamics of the first days of a campaign based on backer activities. Our results show that the weekdays Monday and Tuesday prove to be the most favourable days to start a crowdfunding campaign. We further show that specific starting conditions affect the success or failure of a crowdfunding campaign.