Suchergebnisse

This opening article maps the terrain of the ongoing debate over various forms of 'non-Western' International Relations (IR) theory-building enterprise with the aim not only of providing contextual background for the Special Section, but also, and more importantly, of identifying what is missing in the overall debate. It is often pointed out that IR as a discipline is 'too Western centric', and that much of mainstream IR theory is 'simply an abstraction of Western history'. In this respect, many IR scholars have called for 'broadening' the theoretical horizon of IR while problematising the Western parochialism of the discipline, and it is increasingly acknowledged that IR needs to embrace a wider range of histories, experiences, and theoretical perspectives, particularly those outside of the West. However, despite such a meaningful debate over non-Western IR theorisation and its recent contributions, several critical questions and issues still remain unclear and under-explored. I suggest that there are (at least) three sets of questions that require more careful attention in our discussion. First, does IR need to embrace theoretical pluralism? Second, to what extent has contemporary IR become pluralistic? Third, should IR pursue the promotion of dialogue and engagement across theoretical and spatial divides? Of course, each of these questions invites several subsequent questions. This discussion will serve as a useful point from which more substantial and exciting bearings may be taken in enriching the ongoing debate and moving IR towards becoming a more pluralistic discipline.

Address before the Royal institute of international affairs, London, Dec. 5, 1945.

Part 1: Hearing June 6, 1979. III,110 S.;; Part 2: Hearing October 1, 1979. III,170 S

Discusses the uses of international achievement study results as a tool for national progress as well as an obstacle. This title provides recommendations for ways that international achievement data can be used in real-world policymaking situations. It also discusses what the future of international achievement studies holds.

Several developments in international trade in services impact strongly on developing countries: First, the world-wide diffusion of information technologies (IT) has created new export opportunities for developing countries in IT services. Second, the recently proclaimed Millennium Development Goals for poverty reduction can only be attained if key services are provided more efficiently in developing countries - particularly through the liberalization of service imports. Third, in the ongoing Doha Development Round (DR) of trade negotiations, developing countries are asked to formally commit to liberalizing their service imports under the terms of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Developing countries will benefit from liberalizing service imports if liberalization enhances competition on the supply side. This is typically the case for producer services, such as domestic and international transport, financial services, and telecommunications. The lifting of restrictions on the market access by foreigners (including through direct investment) will often improve service quality or lower prices and thereby enhance the international competitiveness of downstream industries. In Doha Development Round negotiations, therefore, developing countries may find it useful to commit to liberalizing imports of producer services. By contrast, the benefits of import liberalization are less clear for some consumer services where supply is subject to network monopolies (e.g., water and energy distribution) or demand is constrained by poverty (health care, education). Here, achieving a socially optimal level of supply may require carefully calibrated government policies, possibly with international donor support. For developing countries, such sectors should not be priority areas for commitments on service imports under the GATS. Most service exports by developing countries, especially IT services transmitted electronically, face few import barriers in industrialized countries. However, under the GATS, service exports may also be delivered through temporary movement of natural persons, e.g., developing country nationals working in industrialized countries without becoming residents there. If Doha Development Round negotiations were to increase opportunities for such temporary labor migration, the benefits to developing countries could be huge.

A first-generation of feminist scholarship on international relations challenged the implicitly gendered foundations of mainstream IR, including its masculine conceptual bias and state-centricity and the reliance on positivist ways of knowing. These feminist theoretical challenges cleared the path for new thinking and for the development of distinctly gendered approaches to international relations. A second generation of feminist IR scholarship is now emerging, in which empirical research is strengthening and expanding on those earlier theoretical advances. Here, I explore these second-generation efforts to combine gendered theory with close empirical study of global/local processes. These efforts offer a number of lessons for how we might conduct our future scholarship. By showing—not telling—how gender is relevant to global politics, the insights from these studies can build upon one another in impressive ways. As such, they promise to speak to major concerns of feminist and 'mainstream' IR scholars alike.

Networked digital technologies and Open Access (OA) are transforming the processes and institutions of research, knowledge creation and dissemination globally: enabling new forms of collaboration, allowing researchers to be seen and heard in new ways and reshaping relationships between stakeholders across the global academic publishing system. This article draws on Joseph Nye's concept of 'Soft Power' to explore the role that OA is playing in helping to reshape academic publishing in China. It focusses on two important areas of OA development: OA journals and national-level repositories. OA is being supported at the highest levels, and there is potential for it to play an important role in increasing the status and impact of Chinese scholarship. Investments in OA also have the potential to help China to re-position itself within international copyright discourses: moving beyond criticism for failure to enforce the rights of foreign copyright owners and progressing an agenda that places greater emphasis on equality of access to the resources needed to foster innovation. However, the potential for OA to help China to build and project its soft power is being limited by the legacies of the print era, as well as the challenges of efficiently governing the national research and innovation systems.

The fundamental problem in developing a theory of international business ethics, without imposing ethnocentric assumptions, lies in the inherent conflict between the need for universal ethics and the reality of diverse national cultures. Integrative social contracts theory holds an intermediate position between ethical universalist and relativist positions — recognizing universal hypernorms on the one hand and moral free space on the other. We argue that all businesses share a common objective of sustaining long-run economic value for their stakeholders. We develop this argument using an evolutionary logic into a hypernorm along three propositions: First, the firm influences, and is influenced by, members of the society (social context proposition). Second, managers maximize profit subject to joint constraints of technical feasibility and ethical norms (managerial decision proposition). Third, ethical norms evolve from interactions among the stakeholders without a central authority. Natural selection favors norms that maximize long run economic value for the society (natural selection proposition). We show that the hypernorm can spawn widely agreed authentic ethical norms. However, moral bounded rationality when interpreting the hypernorm generates different authentic norms in the moral free space. The evolutionary logic is testable along the dimensions of variation, inheritance and selection of ethical norms.