The International Human Resource Management (IHRM) research on international assignments (IA) is characterised by a domination of US studies and a strong focus on multinational companies (MNC), disregarding that smalland middlesized enterprises (SME) represent close to 90% of all firms in most industries. Our study addresses these shortcomings by providing data from the German chemical industry...

Of all the decisions that managers of SME have to make, laying off someone is the most difficult as well as the hardest to live with. Layoffs are often seen as a personal failure with mental and psychological consequences that can be disastrous for both the person laid off and the employer responsible. Curiously, the suffering experienced by the employer is never mentioned in the SME context. T...

E-business technologies present unique opportunities and challenges for businesses, and Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are no exception. However, there is a rich body of the e-business literature concentrates on adoption concerns from SMEs buyers’ viewpoint, little research has so far been reported from the viewpoint of SME suppliers. Participation of SME suppliers needs to be ensured in ord...

The FACIT-SME European FP-7 project targets to facilitate the use and sharing of Software Engineering (SE) methods and best practices among software developing SMEs. In this context, we present an automatic semantic document searching method based on Word Sense Disambiguation which exploits both syntactic and semantic information provided by external dictionaries and is easily applicable for an...

This research has studied an established Irish retail business as it takes its first tentative steps into the e-commerce arena. Although the adoption of e-commerce is widely studied in the academic world, only a small percentage of these studies focus on the Small to Medium size Enterprise (SME) retail sector. SMEs account for 97% of Irish companies and employ up to 800,000 people (Chamber of C...

Agar medium (SME) prepared from aqueous soil extract was used to examine genetic transformation of Pseudomonas stutzeri JM302 (his-i) by homologous his' DNA in a plate transformation assay. Growth studies indicated that SME was strongly limited in carbon and nitrogen sources. Transformation was observed on SME supplemented with pyruvate, phosphate, and ammonium. A 25-fold increase of the transf...

The attention of software vendors has moved recently to SMEs (smallto medium-sized enterprises), offering them a vast range of enterprise systems (ES), which were formerly adopted by large firms only. From reviewing information technology innovation adoption literature, it can be argued that IT innovations are highly differentiated technologies for which there is not necessarily a single adopti...

ObJECTivE: To evaluate and compare the effectiveness of rapid maxillary expansion (RME) and slow maxillary expansion (SME). MaTERiaLS aND METHODS: PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CENTRaL, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, ClinicalTrial.gov, and SiGLE were searched from January 1980 to October 2012 for randomized or nonrandomized controlled trials. The processes of study search, selection, and qu...

This paper provides results from exploratory research examining attitudes of regional SME principals and their professional advisors toward venture capital and postulates how this may affect regional SME use of venture capital. The research was conducted as part of a larger project investigating relationships between venture capital, venture capitalists and regional SME development. Analysis us...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether supplemental amounts of a polysaccharide/oligosaccharide complex obtained from a shiitake mushroom extract (SME) would lower the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level in patients with prostate cancer. METHODS A total of 62 men (mean age 73.2 years, range 53.6 to 85.5) with histologically proven prostate cancer who had two consecutive elevated PSA readings were ...