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This project explores documentary film practices in India with a specific focus on the relation between documentary film, social movements and political thought and practice. The book concentrates on historical moments significant both in terms of political—referring to state politics as well as non-state activism—and documentary film developments, between the mid 1970s and the present. Hereby, the main body of this anthropological and interdisciplinary research foregrounds the work of women documentary filmmakers and argues that their negotiations of their socio-political and film cultural contexts has led them to, time and again, provoke crucial shifts in and the expansion of documentary modes present today. Hence, Make it Real! argues for feminist film/politics not as a sub-cultural realm, but as making propositions for the political as such and here in particular supported through the continuous discourses in and around documentary mode film. The Make it Real! of the chosen title refers to the book’s theoretical approach, which perceives documentary film not as a tool to represent political issues but as a social, political and artistic practice, which continuously opens out the new—new debates on local and global citizenry. This translates into working from the politics that documentaries make through the realities that they imagine and engender and which are often political by thinking and arguing beyond what is thought within the “limits of the possible” (Rancière). Those contextual proposals for the real and the intelligible develop throughout the book into an interrogation of the ethics of documentary mode filmmaking in the context of contemporary regional and global conflict. Herein the themes discussed include the constitution of movements as such, questions of gender and public space, sexuality and the nation, presentations of the female body, as well as, and interrelated, debates on the politics of historicity, on the question of Human/Rights, victimhood and citizenship and the ethics of listening. The book chapters elaborate on singular moments in which particular historical-political constellations and the discourse and practice of documentary mode filmmaking generate points of emergence or a so called turn, which redefine relations between image making, the political and collectivity. Crucial nodes are: The rise of a new independent documentary film movement in the mid 1970s under a State of Emergency and therefore its particular relation to the nation state, to Marxist ideologies as well as its affinities to the Latin American Third Cinema movement. The particular development of mutual impact between documentary filmmaking and the Indian women's movements in the 1980s, the influence of national and international development organisations on film productions in the 1990s as well as the changing media scene post market liberalisation in 1989, up to the moment of a recent significant turn during the years 2002 to 2004. The latter can be seen as a key moment for filmmakers to rethink the relation between documentary film and its possibilities to address pressing contemporary issues such as the communal violence in Gujarat against the minority Muslim population in 2002, which was followed by increasing pressures through censorship regulations of the state. Both challenges spurred new networks for debate as well as state alternative screening and distribution possibilities and, together with and dependent on preceding developments, paved the way for what might be called ‘the new Indian documentary’. Make it Real! addresses those moments of emergence through the prism of in-depth portraits of selected film examples - where the production process has in most cases been followed ethnographically. Film projects have been chosen for their innovative formal contributions, while recognizing that the focus on urban contexts as well as the personal selection does not at all lead to a representative description. Nevertheless, the examples are perceived as relevant moments of density from where legacies and genealogies are traced. The very writing of film histories is hereby thematized and the subjective views of individuals and institutions, including of the author herself, are implicated and reflected upon. Furthermore, this text argues for the theorizing that arises from conversations (also as media practice) as well as for an ethnography which does not merely describe and analyze the present but seeks to be attuned to the signals of the future present. Filmmakers whose works are addressed in more detail, next to many others mentioned, are: Monica Bhasin, Madhusree Dutta, Deepa Dhanraj, Sherna Dastur, Pooja Kaul, Surabhi Sharma, Soudhamini, Paromita Vohra.
This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution). Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances. In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.
Financing Small Businesses in Western Europe – A Micro-Level and an Institutional Perspective
(2007)
Improving the access to finance for entrepreneurial endeavours is crucial in fostering competition, innovation and growth in Europe. A series of studies has shown that small companies and start-up firms play an important role for an economy’s growth and development perspectives. However, access to sufficient capital to either start operations or grow and further develop their activities is a difficulty faced by many small businesses in Europe. Most financial providers consider small business finance a high-risk activity that generates high transaction costs and/or low returns on investment, and therefore refrain from extending loans to this potential client group. Solving this dilemma has become a major concern to entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and public policymakers. Based on three different data sets, this thesis provides new insights into the issue of small business finance from a micro-level as well as an institutional perspective. The results contribute to further the understanding of the financial needs and behaviours of small businesses and offer some practical recommendations for those involved in improving the access to finance for these enterprises. These findings can be summarised as follows. (1) There is a demand for microlending products in Germany. The target group is typically made up of retail business owners, foreign business owners, and persons with a loan history on the private market rather than the bank market. Key product features include fast access to these loans and flexibility in the repayment schemes. Demand for these products also arises in the periods after the foundation of the business. Therefore, adequate products should particularly focus on those businesses that are already operating. (2) Self-employed households tend to intermingle their household and business finance by transferring funds obtained through consumer loans to their businesses. This behaviour is particularly pronounced for those households that are credit constrained, which indicates an evasion strategy: business loans that cannot be obtained regularly are substituted through consumer loans. (3) Organisations that provide access to finance for small businesses are diverse. Any performance measurement of these entities must therefore be based on a theoretical rationale that takes into account the heterogeneous nature of this sector. A useful typology differentiates these institutions along three dimensions: organisational structure, type of lending, and orientation towards the client or the funder market. Social and financial aspects of performance are closely related to these dimensions and should be evaluated accordingly. Therefore, a policy aimed at improving the finance of small businesses should take the following into consideration. (1) Federal and local government activities on supporting Microfinance institutions (MFIs) should be refocused. Instead of developing own products (which are then distributed through local MFIs) or the provision of loan capital with heavy restrictions on the access to their special loan funds, policy should concentrate on the provision of risk capital available without any restrictions except for a maximum loan size and outreach-oriented targets. Banks and MFIs which aim to use these special funds should then be incentivised to do so. (2) MFIs are important in improving the access to finance for small businesses in Western Europe. Policy has to acknowledge, though, that an MFI sector cannot do the whole job. Consumer lending products of banks are an important source of business finance, which prevents these entities from establishing a credit history and thereby entering the formal banking market. Banks should therefore be incentivised to identify “hidden” business customers and promote them into their business department. (3) Policy makers are interested in identifying MFIs that use public funds in the most efficient way. Peer groups of these institutions could be created using the three dimensions mentioned above to enable more appropriate comparison. After identifying MFIs that perform within each peer group, their lending activities should not be restricted to overwhelming rules and regulations. Rather, they should be supported with sufficient capital to achieve scale and be given the opportunity to operate for some years with a minimum of restrictions on their lending activities.
The Web and enterprise information systems are gradually increasing their reach to a wide range of mobile devices. Although analysts hope for a breakthrough in the popularity of mobile solutions, field studies show that, except for Japan and South Korea, there is still a large gap between the technical capabilities of wireless devices/networks and the adoption of mobile services for business and private use. This paradox can be attributed to a high extent to low quality of existing mobile solutions and to their insufficient usability, represented particularly by two attributes: simplicity of use and content relevance. Additionally, network providers are afraid that mobile Internet could cannibalize their revenues from SMS and entertainment services and do not want to cooperate with service providers to improve the quality of services offered. Wireless applications depend on device-specific features such as input/output mechanisms, screen sizes, computing resources, and support for various multimedia formats and languages. This leads to the need for multi-source authoring - the creation of separate presentations for each device type or, at least, for each class of devices. Multi-source authoring is not a cost-efficient and feasible solution, especially for mobile services consisting of numerous pages. Therefore, various single-source or device-independent techniques that try to tackle the dream of software developers for automatic content generation emerged. These techniques perform the adaptation to the characteristics of mobile devices on the client- or server-side or with the help of some intermediary, the so-called proxy. The high complexity of most adaptation frameworks, missing support for the design and development of mobile content, or the lack of non-proprietary solutions often lead to the rejection of offered adaptation methods. This thesis describes the current state of the art in the area of adaptation techniques and proposes two new approaches for device-independent content delivery that are based on open-source technologies: the Mobile Interfaces Tag Library (MITL) framework and the Mobile Web Services Adaptation (MoWeSA) framework. The first framework is based on Mobile Interfaces Tag Library (MITL), in the second one Web Services Tag Library (WSTL) was introduced. MITL enables dynamic generation of content from existing Web pages, databases, or any other information sources. WSTL aims at the communication with Web Services. In both frameworks the development process is supported by an advanced Integrated Development Environment. Mobile services can be accessed from PCs, mobile phones or PDAs, and can be developed as browser-based or stand-alone applications. The MITL and MoWeSA frameworks currently support content delivery in the most popular formats (HTML, XHTML, WML, and Java ME) but are easily extensible to additional markup languages or standards. Tests conducted among end-user programmers confirmed that the proposed solutions are easy to learn and apply. The frameworks support the separation of tasks between page designers responsible for content presentation and programmers who modify business logic encapsulated in reusable components.
The first chapter investigates the factors that explain the level of technical efficiency of a firm. In an empirical analysis, a unique sample of about 35,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2004 is used. The technical efficiency of the firms is estimated using distribution free assumption and then it is relates to firm- and industry-specific characteristics. One third of the explanatory power is due to industry effects. Size accounts for another 25 percent and the headquarter's location explains ten percent of the variation in efficiency. Most other firm characteristics such as ownership structure, legal form, age of the firm and outsourcing activities have an extremely small explanatory power. R&D activity does not exert any positive influence on technical efficiency. In the second chapter a special attention is given to allocative efficiency. The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency exploits input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. In this paper we propose a new approach to measure allocative efficiency as a profit-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit--technical efficiency space, which does not require information on input prices. To validate the new approach, we perform a Monte-Carlo experiment providing evidence that the estimates of allocative efficiency employing the new and the traditional approach are highly correlated. Finally, as an illustration, we apply the new approach to a sample of about 900 enterprises from the chemical manufacturing industry in Germany. The third chapter notices that the German chemical manufacturing industry experienced a major downsizing during 1992--2004. On the average, size of the firm almost halved. Using modern frontier efficiency analysis, this paper investigates technical and scale efficiency of firms. Based on reliable census data, analysis suggests that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical efficiency, but rather establishing of an optimal scale of production. The share of scale efficiency firms has been persistently increasing, and downsizing was found to be a rational behavior because all scale inefficient firms have continually operated on decreasing returns to scale portion of technology.