DePaul University

About: DePaul University is a education organization based out in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 5658 authors who have published 11562 publications receiving 295257 citations.

E-Commerce Infrastructure Success Factors for Small Companies in Developing Economies

Abstract: This paper looks into the key infrastructure factors affecting the success of small companies in developing economies that are establishing B2B e-commerce ventures. The factors were identified through a literature review and a pilot study carried out in two organizations. The results of the pilot study and literature review reveal five factors that contribute to the success of B2B e-commerce. These factors were later assessed for importance using a survey. The outcome of our analysis reveals that workers' skills, client interface, and technical infrastructure are the most important factors to the success of a B2B e-commerce relationship.

Doing Assessment As If Learning Matters Most

Abstract: After nearly two decades of uphill struggle, the “assessment movement” has reached a promising plateau. In general, US higher education has moved beyond unproductive, dualistic debates – do you remember, “four legs good, two legs bad” from Animal Farm? – over whether assessment should focus on accountability or improvement. Today, most faculty and academic administrators have finally, if reluctantly, come to accept that dealing with both is a political and economic inevitability. Nonetheless, most of us think assessment should be, first and foremost, about improving student learning and, secondarily, about determining accountability for the quality of learning produced. In short, though accountability matters, learning still matters most.

Justice and utility in the classroom: An attributional analysis of the goals of teachers' punishment and intervention strategies.

Abstract: There are a multitude of possible reactions that teachers can have toward students who fall below academic standards. Some of these reactions have utilitarian goals, whereas others are punitive. In this study, the authors investigated these reactions, as well as the situations that determine when these different strategies are likely to be used. Both undergraduates playing the role of teachers (Study 1) and actual high school teachers (Study 2) used attributional information in much the same way to guide their choice of responses to academic failure. Controllable causes of failure give rise to punitive and retributive strategies, whereas lack of controllability elicits utilitarian responses. The stability of the cause moderates teachers' responses to failing students. These attributionally guided interventions are mediated in part by inferences of responsibility, emotional reactions of anger and sympathy, and beliefs in the efficacy of the intervention. The implications of this model are discussed in terms of student motivation and classroom performance. In the public education system, teachers have a considerable amount of freedom to operate their classrooms as they see fit, as long as their system conforms to the guidelines of conduct as mandated by their school district and the law. This leaves teachers with a number of possible interventions for motivating and reprimanding students who fall below their standards of academic achievement. What do teachers do when their students are failing their classes? This is an important issue to address because teachers' reactions to their students can potentially impact students' subsequent motivations, expectations, and behaviors in meaningful ways. In this article, we apply an attributional model of social justice to the intervention decisions that teachers make when dealing with students who do not perform well (see Weiner, Graham, & Reyna, 1997). With this model, we are able to predict whether these interventions are driven by utilitarian or retributive goals. We hope this information will help us to better understand how beliefs about students impact the strategies teachers use as well as the goals teachers have when using these strategies.

Mapping the “Unconscious”: Racism and the Oedipal Family

Abstract: This paper argues that modern constructions of “race” are inherent in specifically modern constructions of heterosexuality and that both of them inform the normative familial quadrad: Mother, Father, Son, and the Repressed (Bestial). These mythic familial categories constitute the basis of the “oedipal” family and are instrumentally interconnected. Here the oedipal triad of Mother-Son-Father is ideationally encoded as white, the repressed bestial being “colored”– typically “black.” I argue racism’s immanence to oedipal familial constructions by spatially reworking Fredric Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious. In so doing, I develop ways for thinking through how the psyche can be understood as a structured and libidinized spatial effect, a repository of colonial violences of body and place, unspoken and hence repressed (“unconscious”). I propose the term racist-oedipalization (after Deleuze and Guattari's oedipalization) to connote the processual ways in which racist thinking and practices are int...

What Do We Know about the Capital Structure of Privately Held US Firms? Evidence from the Surveys of Small Business Finance

Abstract: This study examines the capital-structure decisions of privately held US firms using data from four nationally representative surveys conducted from 1987 to 2003. Book-value firm leverage, as measured by either the ratio of total loans to total assets or the ratio of total liabilities to total assets, is negatively related to firm age and minority ownership; and is positively related to industry median leverage, the corporate legal form of organization, and to the number of banking relationships. In general, these results provide mixed support for both the Pecking-Order and Trade-Off theories of capital structure. What do we know about the capital structure of privately held US firms? The answer is “not much,” as almost all existing empirical studies of the capital structure of US firms have relied upon Compustat data for large corporations with publicly traded securities. 1 Although such large, publicly traded corporations hold the vast majority of business assets, they account for only a small fraction of the number of business entities. In the United States, for example, there are fewer than 10,000 firms that issue publicly traded securities, yet according to the US Internal Revenue Service, there were approximately 30 million small businesses as of