As more people move to cities and urban areas are growing, demand for urban transport increases. This leads not only to pressure on sustainability and climate goals, but also on the attractiveness and liveability of urban areas. Thus, it is necessary to decrease the use of private cars and create a modal shift towards more sustainable modes of transport, such as walking, cycling and public transport. In this context, the introduction of Integrated Mobility Services, IMS (or Mobility as a Service, MaaS), is more and more often brought forward as one key driver to enable such a shift. As the term suggests, integrated mobility services integrate a range of mobility services (e.g. public transport, car sharing, bike sharing, taxi etc.) and provides one-stop access to all services through a common interface, hence creating a seamless customer experience. If different transportation modes are combined in a manner that enables multimodal travel and increases vehicle utilisation rates and vehicle occupancy, such services could help cities deal with problems such as urban congestion, transport-related pollution and accessibility. This paper reviews the literature on Integrated Mobility Services with a focus on what previous research says about drivers and barriers for implementing IMS. To structure the results, the review is guided by the analytical framework of the IRIMS project. This framework draws upon institutional theory, which defines institutions broadly; ranging from societal regulations, planning processes, and consumption patterns, to individual habits and practices. Furthermore, these institutions are found at various levels: the macro level includes the national level where national visions, action plans and goals, as well as legislation, subsidies and taxes are generated. The meso level includes a variety of institutions; public institutions on the regional and local levels, private organisations, public/private hybrids and not-for-profit civil society actors. Finally the micro level includes the individual in her capacity as citizen, as taxpayer, but primarily as customer and user of IMS. At all three levels (macro, meso and micro), barriers and enablers can be both formal (e.g. legislation) and informal (e.g. norms). On a macro level, government has an important role in relation to integrated mobility services both related to creating preconditions for implementing IMS, and to protecting public interest. The subsidization of tickets for public transport, and the implications of this for the role of Public transport within IMS seems to be a key issue, and a related question concerns the boundaries between state subsidized mobility services and commercially viable services, and how these can be combined in IMS solutions. The government could also use taxation policy, financing programs and regulations concerning data availability and standardization as measures to create an enabling environment for IMS. The discourse surrounding IMS at societal level is a strong driver for action, with IMS being presented as a panacea able to solve problems ranging from urban congestion and climate impact of transportation to economic growth and social inclusion. On the meso level, regional and local authorities have an important role to create an enabling environment for IMS regarding the physical infrastructure for public transport, bike infrastructure, carsharing services etc. On the informal side, a major driving force for getting IMS up and running is the perceived business opportunity in the nascent IMS market, not least for private actors. Several actors need to collaborate for a scalable integrated mobility service to materialize. This can be organised in a "business ecosystem", where multiple actors add services from their core businesses into a whole that constitutes the integrated mobility service offering. If an offer of integrated mobility services is to emerge within a reasonable timeframe, one actor within the business ecosystem needs to take the lead, but in order for the system to survive, all required actors in the ecosystem must benefit from its existence. An interesting dimension relates to what different actors in the IMS ecosystem perceive is their role in relation to new mobility services, and the implications of different actors taking the lead. It is yet unclear who will/should take the role as service integrator. The question of different actors finding their role in the IMS ecosystem is made even more interesting by the fact that not only automotive OEMs and public transport operators are looking into ways of innovating using IMS, but also telecom, retail and media organisations. The extent to which these different actors, from different backgrounds, complement or compete with each other is a question yet to be settled. Public transport is generally seen as a backbone in integrated mobility services, and many public transport operators wish to take the lead in the development of new services, which they see as a complement to their existing services. On the other hand, private third party organisations could be seen as better suited to create service offerings that cater to other customer groups than the traditional public transport customers. The decision to sell public transport tickets through a commercial IMS integrator lies with the public transport operators, which could be a substantial barrier to IMS implementation with commercial IMS integrators. Integrated mobility services require a mobility platform that combines the different modes into one integrated service, and a major enabler for IMS is hence the rapid development within ICT. But although a number of such platforms are now available at the market, only a few of these have been tested in other contexts than smaller pilots. At the micro level, several trends are supportive of IMS. Increased densification of city centres creates incentives for citizens to consider alternatives to own their own car. Changes in the cost of owning a car could also have a large impact on the demand for IMS. Furthermore, the growth of the "sharing economy" means services such as IMS are gaining more acceptance among consumers. Research on IMS point to several kinds of potential customer benefits, such as personalised service, ease of transaction, ease of payment, dynamic journey management, and journey planning based on personal preferences. The primary customer base is likely to be "flexi travellers" who can often travel by public transport but also need other means of transport on a regular basis. This customer base will experience a well-functioning integrated mobility service as a very price-worthy alternative to private car ownership, and thus have a high willingness to pay for it. However, research within behavioural economics shows that customers generally tend to overvalue current benefits and undervalue potential gains, resulting in a status quo bias, which means attracting enough customers to a new type of mobility service will be a challenge.
Introduction. Francis Fukuyama in his famous book "The End of History and the Last Man" assumes that human history should be considered as the battle of ideologies that reaches its goal in the universalization of Western liberal democracy. Author's ideas have gained many supporters. At the same time, they were subjected to severe criticism that reflected the important trends of political life and ideological preferences. Leaving aside the criticism based on geopolitical and civilizational confrontation and confusion which confronts Fukuyama's theory, it should be stated that anthropological aspect of Fukuyama's theory has vastly evaded philosophical comprehension. Purpose. This article attempts to test Fukuyama's theory through the lens of philosophical anthropology and analyze human desire for recognition in the context of Fukuyama's World History. Methodology. The analysis is focused on human desire for recognition as a significant dimension of human nature. The author has used hermeneutical methodology and anthropological integrative approach. Theoretical basis and results. Fukuyama is not satisfied by merely economic interpretation of history emphasizing that human is not simply an economic animal. Economic development fails to explain why people advocate the principles of liberal democracy. The author goes back to Hegel's non-materialistic view of history based on the struggle for recognition. According to Fukuyama, this deeply rooted human desire for recognition is the great motor of history and cause of tyranny, conflicts, and wars. But at the same time, it also acts as a psychological foundation of many virtues – the spirit of citizenship, courage, and justice. Throughout history, this desire for recognition was not satisfied. Only modern liberal democracy provides universal recognition of all humans ensuring and protecting their rights. Originality. Fukuyama's concept is important and interesting because it draws attention to the sphere of human values, which essentially influences the basis of personality structure. Unlike traditional liberalism, which focuses on materialism and justice, Fukuyama considers the struggle for recognition, the spiritual search for human dignity and equality (or superiority) the major component of social transformation. Human acts as a central point of political, cultural, economical space: he/she is the creator and the creation. Conclusions. Over time, the concept of Fukuyama has undergone significant changes. Modern civilization has been facing with an acute problem of growing inequality, serious financial crisis, political havoc and military conflicts, migrants and refugees problem. But so far the idea of liberal democracy has no real competitors. ; Введение. Фрэнсис Фукуяма в своей знаменитой книге «Конец истории и последний человек» отмечает, что человеческая история должна рассматриваться с точки зрения битвы идеологий, достигшей своей цели в универсализации западной либеральной демократии. Новая теория приобрела много сторонников, которые восторженно встретили ее появление. Одновременно она была подвергнута острой критике, в которой отразились важные тенденции мировой политической жизни, а также идеологические пристрастия авторов. Оставив в стороне критику, основанную на геополитическом и цивилизационном противостоянии, необходимо отметить, что антропологическая составляющая теории Фукуямы практически исчезла из поля зрения критиков. Цель. В статье предпринята попытка взглянуть на теорию Фукуямы сквозь призму философской антропологии и подвергнуть анализу человеческое стремление к признанию в контексте мировой истории Фукуямы. Методология. Автор использовал философскую герменевтику и антропологический интегративный подход. Основная часть. Фукуяма не удовлетворяется лишь экономической трактовкой истории, подчеркивая, что человек – это не просто экономическое животное. Экономическое развитие не в состоянии объяснить, почему люди становятся сторонниками принципа народного суверенитета и гарантий основных прав под управлением закона. Автор обращается к гегелевскому нематериалистическому взгляду на историю, основанному на борьбе за признание. Именно стремление к признанию со стороны других людей Фукуяма рассматривает в качестве двигателя истории и причины тирании, конфликтов и войн. Но вместе с тем оно же выступает как психологический фундамент многих добродетелей – духа гражданственности, храбрости и справедливости. На протяжении почти всей истории человечества стремление к признанию не реализовывалось. По мнению Фукуямы, только современная либеральная демократия дает универсальное признание всем людям, гарантируя им права и защищая эти права. Новизна. Концепция Фукуямы важна и интересна тем, что привлекает внимание к ценностной сфере человека, существенно влияющей на формирование структуры личности. В отличие от традиционного либерализма, ставящего во главу угла материализм и справедливость, американский исследователь основным компонентом социальных трансформаций считает борьбу за признание, духовный поиск человеческого достоинства и равенства/преимущества. Именно человек выступает как центральная точка цивилизационного пространства, одновременно его творец и творение. Выводы. С течением времени концепция Фукуямы претерпела существенные изменения. Современная цивилизация столкнулась с острой проблемой растущего неравенства, серьезным финансовым кризисом, политическим хаосом и острыми военными конфликтами, проблемой мигрантов и беженцев. Однако до сих пор в сфере идей либеральная демократия не имеет реальных конкурентов. ; Вступ. Френсіс Фукуяма у своїй славетній книзі «Кінець історії та остання людина» наголошує на тому, що людська історія повинна розглядатися з точки зору битви ідеологій, що досягла своєї мети в універсалізації західної ліберальної демократії. Нова теорія здобула багато прихильників, які захоплено зустріли її появу. Одночасно вона була піддана гострій критиці, в якій відбилися важливі тенденції політичного життя, а також ідеологічні пристрасті авторів. Залишивши осторонь критику, засновану на геополітичному і цивілізаційному протистоянні, необхідно зазначити, що антропологічна складова теорії Фукуями практично зникла з поля зору критиків. Мета. У статті здійснено спробу дослідити теорію Фукуями крізь призму філософської антропології та піддати аналізу людське прагнення до визнання у контексті Світової Історії Фукуями. Методологія. Автор використовував філософську герменевтику та антропологічний інтегративний підхід. Основна частина. Фукуяма не задовольняється лише економічним трактуванням історії, підкреслюючи, що людина не є просто економічною твариною. Економічний розвиток неспроможний пояснити, чому люди стають прихильниками принципу народного суверенітету і гарантій основних прав під управлінням закону. Автор повертається до гегелівського нематеріалістичного погляду на історію, заснованого на боротьбі за визнання. Саме прагнення до визнання з боку інших людей Фукуяма розглядає в якості двигуна історії і причини тиранії, конфліктів і війн. Але разом з тим воно ж постає як психологічний фундамент багатьох чеснот – духу громадянськості, хоробрості і справедливості. Протягом майже всієї історії людства прагнення до визнання не реалізовувалося. На думку Фукуями, лише сучасна ліберальна демократія дає універсальне визнання всім людям, гарантуючи їм права і захищаючи ці права. Новизна. Концепція Фукуями важлива і цікава тим, що привертає увагу до ціннісної сфери людини, яка суттєво впливає на формування структури особистості. На відміну від традиційного лібералізму, що ставив на чільне місце матеріалізм і справедливість, американський дослідник основним компонентом соціальних трансформацій вважає боротьбу за визнання, духовний пошук людської гідності та рівності/переваги. Саме людина виступає як центральна точка цивілізаційного простору, одночасно його творець і творіння. Висновки. З плином часу концепція Фукуями зазнала суттєвих змін. Сучасна цивілізація зіткнулася з гострою проблемою зростаючої нерівності, серйозною фінансовою кризою, політичним хаосом і гострими військовими конфліктами, проблемою мігрантів та біженців. Однак і досі в сфері ідей ліберальна демократія не має реальних конкурентів.
The work for this thesis was done during the period 2010 to 2016, after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and in the immediate wake of the Eurozone debt crisis that has casted doubts on European integration. With the crisis largely blamed on bank excessive risk-taking and supervisors' inability to contain it, and with the aim to prevent similar crises in the future, much of the policy discussions and regulatory actions have focused on ways to address both of these failures of market economies. One way concerns the strengthening of market discipline, i.e., strengthening the incentives and capacity of external stakeholders (depositors, shareholders and other holders of bank liabilities) to induce more prudent risktaking behavior by bank managers. Thus motivated, this thesis focuses on the channels and effectiveness of market discipline. Said differently, it explores whether, and how, market forces could be trusted to do a better job in containing risk-taking behavior by banks and thus effectively support and supplement supervisors' efforts. From a policy-making point of view, the thesis explores whether market discipline can promote financial stability. The thesis comprises of three empirical papers. The first explores whether the expected government support of banks, implicit or explicit, weakens market discipline. The second explores whether the intrusive external monitoring by knowledgeable and influential external stakeholders fosters more prudent loan-loss provisions and, hence, more prudent accounting practices by banks. The third paper extends the second, taking into account the role of the institutional and social environment in an international setting. The results from all three papers are supportive of the notion that market discipline can promote financial stability. Details follow. The first paper explores whether expected government support weakens market discipline by bank shareholders, especially after the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2008. Two counter-veiling forces are at work. On the one hand, as it is suggested by the related literature, the expected support may give banks greater leeway to undertake risks, for it reduces the monitoring incentives of depositors and other bank creditors. Shareholders, recognizing the resultant higher probability of default as well as the possibility that they might be wiped out in case of bank default, have an incentive to intensify monitoring and exercise stronger market discipline. On the other hand, the expected support may also reduce the possibility of a bank run, weakening as a result the need for monitoring by bank shareholders and, hence, market discipline on their part. Expected support is measured as the difference of two bank credit ratings from Moody's: an all-in rating, which encompasses expected support, and a stand-alone rating, which does not. We estimate a model in which a forward-looking measure of shareholder value, the market-to-book ratio, is the dependent variable and the measure of expected support is one of the explanatory variables. A negative coefficient of the expected support would be consistent with market discipline for it would indicate that shareholders are willing to pay less for banks with higher expected support The results, from a sample of about 250 banks worldwide, indicate that, far from weakening market discipline by shareholders, the expected support strengthens it, and more so for the riskier banks – i.e., those with lower stand-alone rating. The results also highlight the two counter-veiling effects of the expected support on market discipline. Specifically, as the size of the expected support increases, its negative effect on the market-to-book ratio decreases. The second paper sheds light on earnings management via loan-loss provisions (LLPs) and the associated trade-off between financial-statement transparency and financial stability, by exploiting time and cross-sectional variation. The time variation pertains to the welldocumented shift towards more forward-looking LLPs after the crisis of 2008. The working hypothesis is that the rules concerning LLPs effectively shifted in favor of forward-looking provisions. This shift is expected to be associated with stronger income smoothing and signaling, and more so for banks subject to weaker market discipline. The cross sectional variation pertains to the intrusive external monitoring by funds that are members of the US Sustainability Investment Forum (USSIF). The working hypothesis is that this process amounts to stronger monitoring and, hence, stronger market discipline. Thus, it is expected that income smoothing and signaling will be weaker for the banks in which USSIF funds invest relative to the remaining banks. Moreover, after the said shift in supervisory and regulatory preferences, income smoothing and signaling will increase by less for banks in which USSIF funds invest. The results, from a sample of more than 300 publicly-held US bank holding companies, over the period 1999 – 2014, confirm that the banks under the intrusive monitoring exhibit less earnings management. Since, however, this differential behavior got more pronounced after the regulatory shift, the results further suggest that USSIF funds induce provisioning behavior that goes well beyond the stricter application of the existing accounting and supervisory rules, thus ameliorating the aforementioned trade-off. The third paper explores whether the inclusion of a bank in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) reduces bank managers' incentives for earnings management through loan-loss provisions. The inclusion in the DJSI depends on a rigorous bank assessment, conducted each year. The working hypothesis is that being included in the DJSI constitutes a credible signal to outside stakeholders of prudent behavior. An aspect of such behavior is less earnings management through loan-loss provisions. The results from a sample of 297 banks around the globe, over the period 2004 – 2010, indicate that banks included in the DJSI engage in less earnings management relative to the banks that were assessed but not included. This more prudent provisioning behavior persists when we control for the strength of private sector monitoring with country-level indices for private sector monitoring and the quality of external audits. Yet, it largely diminishes when we control for the strength of supervisory power and capital regulation. The last result poses an interesting question: Is stronger supervision a substitute of market discipline? Or, is the DJSI assessment process geared towards accepting more banks from countries with stronger supervision; All in all, the papers in this thesis highlight the important and decisive role market discipline plays in the financial system. They suggest that shareholders, probably driven by the objective difficulty of accurately assessing banks' true condition and prospects, appreciate credible signals of prudent behavior. The results are also supportive of the power of external monitoring as a restraining factor in bank-managers' risk-taking.
My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault's expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography's strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models' performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.
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John Dewey on the Horror of Making his Poetry Public
This April's Fools interview is a preview for 'The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations' (ed. Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten & Hidemi Suganami), now available at Palgrave.
After various rounds of experimentation, two youthful IR scholars (the editor-in chief of this venture and Christian Bueger) bend space-time and access an alternate reality with the ambition to conduct an interview for Theory Talks with John Dewey. Dewey (1859-1952) was an American thinker often associated with a school of thought that has become known as American pragmatism. He is today largely known for his contributions to education studies, philosophy of science, and the theory of democracy. In this Talk, the young scholars sound out Dewey on what thinking tools his original worldview would provide for IR—after resolving a small embarrassment.
TT Dear Mr. Dewey. Thank you so much for your willingness to participate in this Talk. Theory Talks is an open-access journal that contributes to International Relations debates by publishing interviews with cutting-edge theorists. It is not often that Theory Talks is able to overcome space-time limitations and conduct a Talk with a departed theorist.
I am sorry—I think I have to interrupt you there…
TT Well, all right?
Yes, yes, the fact of the matter is that I am not a theorist and refuse to be associated with that label! To purify theory out of experience as some distinct realm, sirs, is to contribute to a fallacy that I have dedicated my life to combat! I am afraid that this venture of yours, of involving me in this Theory Talks, is stillborn.
TT Dear Professor Dewey—with all due respect, we are running ahead of matters here a little. The reason why we invited you is exactly for you to expound your ideas—and reservations—regarding theory, practice, and international relations. Would you be willing to bracket your concern for a minute? We promise to get back to it.
Well my dear sirs—it is that you insist on a dialogue—that restless, participative and dramatic form of inquiry that leads to so much more insight than books—and that you have travelled from far by means that utterly fascinate me, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
TT Thank you. And let us from the outset emphasize that by interviewing you for Theory Talks, we don't necessarily want to reduce your contribution to thought to the practice of theorizing. Isn't it also correct you have written poetry?
Now I am baffled a second time! I have never publicly attempted my hand at the noble art of the poetic!
TT It has to be said, Mr. Dewey, that the problem of what is and isn't public has perhaps shifted a bit since your passing away. That's something we'd like to discuss, too, but the fact of the matter is that what you have consistently consigned to the trashcan of your office at Columbia University has been just as meticulously recovered by 'a janitor with a long view'.
Oh heavens! You tell me I have been uncovered as a versifier? What of my terrible scribbling has been uncovered you say?
TT Well, perhaps you recognize the one that starts like:
I hardly think I heard you call
Since betwixt us was the wall
Of sounds within, buzzings i' the ear
Roarings i' the vein so closely near…
… 'That I was captured in illusion/Of outward things said clear…' I well remember—a piece particularly deserving of oblivion. I wrote that in the privacy of lonely office hours, thinking the world would have the mercy not to allow a soul to lay its eyes on it!
TT We are sorry to say that besides this one, a total of 101 poems has been recovered, and published in print—and you know, given some advances in technology, circulation of text is highly accelerated, meaning that one could very well say your poetry is part of the public domain.
So there I am, well half a decade after my death, subject to the indirect effects of advances in technology interacting with the associations I myself carelessly established between roses, summer days, and all too promiscuous waste bins! Sirs, in the little time we have conversed, I see the afterlife hasn't brought me any good. Hades takes on a bleaker shade…
TT Well, in reality, the future has been good to you: you are firmly canonised as one an authentic American intellectual, and stand firmly on a pedestal in the galleries occupied by the notables of modern international social thought. So why don't we explore a little bit why that is, within the specific domain of political theory? Theory Talks actually poses the same first three questions to every interviewee, followed by a number of questions specific to your thought. The first question we always pose is: What, according to you, is the biggest challenge or central debate in International Relations and what is your position vis-à-vis that challenge/debate?
I think that while it must have been noted by other interviewees that in fact this question is two separate questions—one about real-world challenges and another about theoretical debates—I would be the last to do so, and I am happy you mix concerns of theory and practice. I have always fought against establishing such a fictional separation between seemingly distinct domains of thought and practice. It is a dangerous fiction on top of it. The same goes for International Relations—while I have not dedicated myself to the study of the international as a discrete field of action, I do think that this domain does not escape some of the general observations I have made regarding society and its politics.
I hold that "modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected" by all kinds of associations. As I explain in The Public and its Problems, a fundamental challenge of modern times is that the largely technically mediated associations that constitute societies have outstretched the social mechanisms that we had historically developed on the human scale of the village to mitigate their indirect effects on others. During my life, I witnessed the proliferation of railway, telegraph, radio, steam-driven shipping, and car and weapon industries—thoroughly extending the web of association and affectedness within and across borders. This means action constantly reaches further. People close by and in far-off places are suddenly confronted with situations that they have to relate to but which are out of their control. This automatically makes them part of interested publics, with a stake in the way these mechanisations work. Now this perhaps seems abstract but consider: the spread of a new technology—I see you both looking on some small device with a black mirrored screen nervously every 5 minutes—automatically involves users as a 'stakeholder'. Your actions are mediated by them. You become affected by their design and configuration—over which you have little control. In that regard, you are part of a concerned public, but you have no way to influence the politics constitutive of these technologies.
I would say the largest challenge is to amplify participation and to institutionalize these fleeting publics. The proliferation of technologies and institutions as conduits for international associations has rendered publics around the globe more inchoate, while seemingly making it easier than ever before to influence—for good or ill—large groups through the manipulation of these global infrastructures of the public. We sowed infrastructures, we reap fragilities and more diffusely affected publics: each new technological expansion of the possibility to form associations leads to concomitant insecurities.
TT How did you arrive where you currently are in your thinking?
I have had the sheer luck or fortune to be engaged in the occupation of thinking; and while I am quite regular at my meals, I think that I may say that I would rather work, and perhaps even more, play, with ideas and with thinking than eat. I was born in the wake of the Civil War, and in times of a profound acceleration of technology as a vehicle of social, economic, and political development. Perhaps, as in your own times, upheaval and change was the status quo, stability a rare exception. My studies at Johns Hopkins with people such as Peirce had tickled an intellectual curiosity as of yet unsatisfied. I subsequently went to the University of Chicago for a decade in which my commitment to pragmatist philosophy consolidated. Afterwards at Columbia, and at the New School which I founded with people such as Charles A. Beard and Thorsten Veblen, this approach translated into a number of books. In these I applied my pragmatist convictions to such disparate issues as education, art, faith, logic and indeed politics, the topic of your question. For me, these are all interdependent aspects of society. This interdependence and inseparability of the social fabric means that skewed economic or political interests will reverberate throughout. But I am an optimist in that I also believe in the fundamental possibility and promise of science and democracy to curb radical change and reroute it into desirable directions for those affected. Good things are also woven through the social and we should amplify those to lessen the effects of negative associations.
TT What would a student require to become a specialist in International Relations or to see the world in a global way?
A question dear to my heart. You might know that throughout my entire life I have striven for transforming our understanding and practice of education. Human progress is dependent on education, and as I have learned during my travels to Russia, reform is not to be had by revolution but by gradual education. Education is training in reflective thinking. The quality of democracy depends on education.
Towards the end of my life I witnessed the creation of the United Nations. This was a clear signal to me that "the relations between nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call for some measure of political organization". Having this forum implied that we saw the end of the complete denial of political responsibility of how the policies in one national unit affect another as we find in the doctrine of sovereignty. That the end of this doctrine is within reach means that we require global education which will ensure the rise of informed global publics which can develop the tools required to respond to global challenges.
In a more substantive fashion, I would insist that students hold on to the essential impossibility to separate out experience as it unfolds over time. The divisions and preferences that have come to dominate academic knowledge in its 20th century 'maturing' are for me a loss of rooting of knowledge in experience.
TT We're sorry, but isn't the task of social sciences to offer universal or at least objective analytical categories to make sense of the muddle of real-world experience? What you seem to be proposing is the opposite!
I align with Weber in lamenting the acceleration of the differentiation of understanding in society. This has made it difficult for your generations to address social, political and economic challenges head on while avoiding getting lost in one of its details or facets. Isn't the economic and the political, constantly encroaching on everyday life? In the end, this perhaps explains my insistence on democracy and schooling as the pivots of good society: democracy to reconstruct and defend publics, and schooling to defend individuals against (mis)understanding the world in ways that cannot be reduced to their own lived experience. If students could only hold on to this holistic perspective and eschew isolating subject matters from their social contexts.
TT Throughout your 70 years of active scholarship you have written over a thousand articles and books. One commentator of your work suggested that your body of writing is an "elaborate spider's web, the junctions and lineaments of which its engineer knows well and in and on which he is able to move about with great facility. But for the outsider who seeks to traverse or map that territory there is the constant danger of getting stuck." Many find your work difficult to navigate—what advice would you give the reader?
Sirs why would anyone want to engage in a quest of mapping all of my writings? You have to understand that thought always proceeds in relations. A web, perhaps, yes. A spider's web certainly not. A spider that spins a web out of himself, produces a web that is orderly and elaborate, but it is only a trap. That is the goal of pure reasoning, not mine. The scientific method of inquiry is rather comparable to the operations of the bee who collects material within and from the world, but attacks and modifies the collected stuff in order to make it yield its hidden treasure. "Drop the conception that knowledge is knowledge only when it is a disclosure and definition of the properties of fixed and antecedent reality; interpret the aim and test of knowing by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific inquiry". The occasion of thinking and writing is the experience of problems and the need to clarify and resolve them. Everything depends on the problem, the situations and the tools available. Inquiry does not rely on a priori elements or fixed rules. I always attempted to start my work by understanding in which problematic situations I aimed at intervening. Philosophy and academic, but also public life, in my time was heading in wrong directions that called upon me to initiate inquiry to resolve issues—in media res, as it were. When I wrote Logic, I tried to rebut dogmatic understandings. Now it appears that I am on the verge of becoming a dogma myself. In a sense, the most tragic scenario would be if people develop a "Deweyan" perspective or theory. Now I am curious, what problem brought you actually to converse with me?
TT Well, we are here today because we have been asked to contribute to an effort to collect the views of a number of different theorists, who, like you, live in different space-time. Now that we are here, could we ask you to tell us how you use the term 'inquiry'? It is one of your core concepts and in our conversation you already frequently referred to it. It is often difficult to understand what you mean by this term and how it provides direction and purpose for science…
It's a simple one, provided you have not been indoctrinated by logical positivists. You, me, all of us, frequently engage in inquiry. There is little distinction between solving problems of everyday life and the reasoning of the scientist or philosopher. Most often habit and routine will give you satisfaction. Yet when these fail or give you unpleasant experience, then reasoning begins. Without inquiry, sirs, most likely you wouldn't have been able to speak to me today! You will have to explain later how you bended time and space and which technology allowed you to travel through a black hole. But Albert was right, time travel is possible! Could we converse today without Einstein's fabulous inquiry that led him to the realization of space-time? Until the promulgation of Einstein's restricted theory of relativity, mass, time and motion were regarded as intrinsic properties of ultimate fixed and independent substances. Einstein questioned this on the basis of experimentation and an investigation of the problem of simultaneity, that is, that from different reference frames there can never be agreement on the simultaneity of events.
Reflection implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced without any intermediary fact; at another time, we infer that it has rained from the looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain because of the condition of the air or the state of the barometer. The fact that inquiry intervenes in ever-shifting contexts demands us to restrain from eternal truths or absolutistic logic. Someone believing in a truth such as "individualism", has his program determined for him in advance. It is then not a matter of finding out the particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, and the circumstances, of doing it. He knows in advance the sort of thing which must be done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the thinker knew in advance what must happen, so that all he had to do was to supply a logical framework of definitions and classifications.
When I say that thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not absolutistic, I have in mind a certain logic of method. Such a logic firstly implies that the concepts, general principles, theories and dialectical developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge are shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, policies and proposals for social action have to be treated as working hypotheses. They have to be subject to constant and well-equipped observations of the consequences they entail when acted upon and subject to flexible revision. The social sciences are primarily an apparatus for conducting such investigations.
TT Doesn't such a form of reasoning mean we'll just muddle through without ever reaching certainty?
Absolutely correct! Arriving at one point is the starting point of another. Life flowers and should be understood as such; experimental reasoning is never complete. I can imagine the surprise you must feel at sudden unforeseen events in international political relationships when you hold on to fixed frames of how these relationships do and ought to look. That we will never reach certainty does not imply to give up the quest of certainty, however. We have to continuously improve on our tools of scientific inquiry…
TT Sorry to interrupt you here. Now it sounds as if you have a sort of methods fetish. Do you imply that everything can be solved by the right method and all that we have to do is to refine our methods? That's something that our colleagues running statistics and thinking that the problems of international can be solved by algorithms argue as well.
It might be that mathematical reasoning has well advanced since my departure, and that the importance granted to the economy and economic thinking as the sole conditioning factor of political organisation has only increased, but you haven't fully grasped what I mean by 'tools'. Tell your stubbornly calculating colleagues that inquiry is embedded in a situation, hence there cannot be a single method which would fix all kinds of problems. Second, while I admire the skill of mathematicians, what I mean by tools goes well beyond that. A tool can be a concept, a term, a theory, a proposal, a course of action, anything that might matter to settle a particular situation. A tool is however not a solution per se. It is a proposal. It must be tested against the problematic material. It matters only in so far as it is part of a practical activity aimed at resolving a problematic situation.
TT You emphasize that language is instrumental and reject the idea of a private language. You also spent quite some energy to demolish the "picture theory" of language. These arguments form the basis of what we call today "constructivism", yet they are mainly subscribed to the Philosophical Investigations of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Earhh, I am aware of this fellow. He is an analytical philosopher, so develops his argument from a different background. I started to work on the social and cultural aspects of language use from around 1916. I don't know whether Wittgenstein actually read my work when he set out to write Philosophical Investigations, but you are quite right, there are obvious parallels. I think my own term of "conjoint activity" expresses pretty much the same, perhaps less eloquently, what Wittgenstein termed language games. I am pleased to hear, however, that the instrumental view on language, that objects get their meanings within a language in and by conjoint community of functional use, has become firmly established in academia. I'd have reservations about the term, 'constructivism'. It might be useful since it reminds us of all the construction work that the organization of politics and society entails. Indeed I have frequently stressed that instrumentalist theory implies construction. If constructivism doesn't mean post-mortem studies of how something has been constructed, but is directed towards production of better futures, I might be fine with the term. But perhaps I would prefer 'productivism'.
TT That is a plausible term, but we are afraid, the history of science has settled on constructivism. And you are right, the tendencies you warn us of are significantly present in our discipline.
Sirs, if you permit. I have to attend to other obligations. I wish you safe travels back. Make sure you pick up something from the gift shop before you leave.
In: Kirkels , Y E M 2010 , ' Brokerage in SME networks ' , Doctor of Philosophy , Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences , Eindhoven . https://doi.org/10.6100/IR690690
Firms are increasingly facing their own limitations in today's complex and demanding environment. The need for cooperation is evident in an environment characterized by uncertainty, complexity and rapid technological progress. Small and medium-sized enterprises in particular are faced by a dilemma. On the one hand SMEs feel the urge to cooperate with others in order to acquire knowledge and other competencies; on the other hand they often face difficulties in finding partners and often they lack the knowledge base to be able to absorb the required knowledge. This dilemma clearly points to a need for understanding their environment, and brokers in particular, in order to deal effectively with the complex environment. Brokers, or intermediaries, are regarded as people who connect disconnected parties and facilitate knowledge flows in the local innovation system. Since brokers are becoming more and more important the need arises to provide SMEs with insight into the role of brokers in the network. The main question of this dissertation is: Which factors contribute to the capacity of main brokers in a SME network? This dissertation investigates their network environment, their inter-firm relations and intrinsic characteristics that facilitate networking at an individual level. The focus of this study is on the SME network of design and high-tech companies in Southeast Netherland. The fields ascribe to the research since their activities involve complex knowledge processes which in turn benefit highly of optimal knowledge creation and exchange. Design is seen as increasingly important in product development and there is an increase in efforts to establish co-operations between design and high-tech organizations. The design sector is a dynamic but highly fragmented industry. However, high-tech organizations (i.e. original equipment manufacturers, first, second and third tier suppliers) in the region seem to be highly interdependent. By this study we aim to gain a better understanding of efficiency across these particular fields. To study the network environment, inter-firm relations and intrinsic characteristics of brokers, we have conducted quantitative and qualitative research. A questionnaire was used to map the most important work relations between people who are active in the fields of design and high-tech industries. Respondents were asked to mention the names and organizations of at most ten Dutch business partners who had an important (qualitative) influence on their performance over the last five year. In order to take into account the full richness of relationships in the network the respondent had to identify who was important to them in what way. Everybody who was listed in the response also received an invitation to fill in the survey. Data collection took place in several waves. This snowball technique is developed to identify hidden members and relation patterns. Social network analysis is used to draw the actual network and to identify the brokers. The results in Chapter two and three are based on the main component of this network which includes 440 names and 584 relations mentioned by 93 respondents. Finally, in order to investigate what brokers actually do an empirical multiple case study is conducted. The information regarding the actual network across design and high-tech industries is used to select 12 brokers for semi-structured interviews. A qualitative comparative analysis of the results has provided a more general picture of how brokers span structural holes between various social groups. Question 1 This dissertation searches to answer five subquestion underlying the main research question. The first of these questions addresses connectivity and efficiency of the SME network across design and high-tech industries. These characteristics are likely to be different for networks of various industries. The growing importance of networks requires that SMEs thoroughly understand its characteristics, so they can use this knowledge to their own advantage. The first question of this research is: 1) What are the structural network characteristics of the SME network, in particular at network and subgroup level? Chapter two investigates if knowledge is transferred in an efficient way, if there are partnership concentrations and who is involved in co-operations. The concept of 'small worlds' is used to investigate knowledge diffusion in the network and consequently judge overall network efficiency. Proximity to others is important in order to manage the complex processes. However entrepreneurs or SMEs do not have the resources to manage a large network. A few well positioned stakeholders can be dealt with. A small world consists of a relatively small number of intermediaries which are relative closely positioned to people in the environment and which probably have stable reputations and various backgrounds. Knowing more about small worlds in this network is therefore highly interesting for science and valuable to the region. The actual network can be classified as one in which a small world is present. The short paths between people indicates the presence of efficient knowledge flows, the high clustering of efficient knowledge exploitation. Visualization of the results shows a single core group in the network, indicating that the two industries are not distinctly separated. It is found that people of the non-profit as well as science sector are overrepresented in the core of the field. Still, this part of the study describes the core-group of people only to a certain extent. Chapter three and four explore who has significant brokerage capacity and the concept of brokerage. Question 2a and 2b In order to investigate brokers they have to be identified first. The second question is: 2a) Can brokers be identified within the SME network? 2b) What types of brokers can be detected within the SME network Chapter three highlights the personal networks of members across design and high-tech industries and investigates the brokerage roles they fulfill. The concept of brokerage roles perceives brokerage behavior as the facilitation of information flows whether or not a direct reward is involved. A person in a network can fulfill several roles depending on his interests. The study of brokerage roles enables to identify who has significant brokerage capacity in the network, but also enables to describe what types of brokers are observed. Our empirical results show that there are persons with significant brokerage capacity in the actual network. Furthermore significant values with regard to gatekeepers, representatives and liaison roles are found. Question 3 In addition to identifying main brokers, Chapter three investigates whether specific characteristics are associated with these brokers. Studying characteristics provides clear insights into how third parties contribute to the transfer and development of knowledge. Question three is: 3) What are characteristics of brokers in the SME network? Whether or not people emerge as brokers seems to depend on the characteristics of people and the context in which they work. Chapter three highlights individual's affiliation, kind of partners and kind of information exchanged in the network, with controls for gender, education and years in branch as sources of brokerage capacity influence. Empirical results show that people with high brokerage capacity are found in the nonprofit and science sector and have a long track record in their branch. Furthermore a wide variety of information is discussed with brokers; practical support in the form of valuable contacts and innovation-related information, but also finance, marketing and operational information. Question 4 The last part of the study complements the research regarding characteristics of brokers by taking an in-depth look at what brokers actually do. This leads to the fourth question of this study: 4. How is brokerage enacted in the SME network? How brokers actually seize network opportunities can be investigated by studying their strategic goals, strategic actions and strategic behavior. Empirical results in Chapter four show that specific strategic goals, activities and behavior can indeed be associated with having high brokerage capacity. The main brokers have a tertius iungens orientation; they strive to interconnect others. It is not in their interest to keep parties, passively or actively, separated for their own personal benefit. They seem not to neglect their personal aims in favor of others. It is just that more can be accomplished together. Furthermore, brokers are mainly involved in knowledge exploring activities, i.e. articulation of needs and requirements, information gathering, connecting partners, setting up projects in order to generate and combine information, and facilitating contract negotiations. Finaly brokers work according to the logic of effectuation. They prefer to focus on current means and they transform these means into co-created goals with others. They consider it less important to focus on setting clear goals in advance and carefully plan and execute their bridging actions to accomplish these goals. At a detailed level, there are differences among main brokers regarding (the combination of) strategic goals, activities and behavior. It indicates that there are different kind of types among main brokers. The answering of the various subquestions enables us to draw a more detailed picture of how brokers span structural holes. People with the highest brokerage capacity are found in the non-profit and science sector. However, the resemblance between these brokers and others is high in general. Brokers discuss a variety of information with others and they have a long track record in their branch. Brokers in general focus on the same strategic goals, activities and behavior. The results implicate that the brokers operate as architects and lead operators of the network. Brokers in this field are less involved in care-taking activities; maintaining and enhancing the existing network. In Chapter 4 it is shown that the sector, especially the job context, influences strategy preferences only at sub-level. Theoretical implications The study is important from an academic perspective because it addresses the voids in research about brokers at the individual level who (consciously) position themselves between heterogeneous actors in networks; people who differ in industry backgrounds and skills. Our results are based on a network of both formal (business) as well as informal (personal) oriented relations at the individual level, while most relationships in the existing literature are based on formal relationships only and usually studied at firm level. The study in general provides more insights into the concept of brokerage regarding SME networks in different fields. In particular it highlights how third parties in general contribute to the transfer and development of knowledge. Chapter two contributes to empirical research concerning structural aspects of a network as a whole and in particular on network structures that span sectors by taking an inter-sectoral approach. Furthermore network theory regarding small worlds is enhanced because our insights contributes to the still infant field that studies the efficiency of partnerships in SME networks. Chapter generates knowledge regarding brokers in general. The main contribution of this part of the study is, in contrast to most other work than our own, that it is quantitative and that it focuses on brokers identified in an actual network (based on both suppliers and users of the knowledge infrastructure). The research contributes to social network theory by taking a look at empirical data in order to generate a better understanding of the specific brokerage concepts first. One can argue that a grounded theory perspective is taken by trying to show how people handle information problems. Chapter four addresses the lack of empirical research regarding the range of brokers and their practices in detail. Chapter four enhances the understanding of social network theory by integrating theories based on the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship regarding brokerage. To be able to develop an individual-level understanding of brokers other theories besides network theory need to be studied. Cross theory studies creates a more holistic view regarding brokerage at the individual level. Such research was not undertaken before. In addition, highlighting individual strategic dimensions separately as well as in combination will also contribute to an extended picture of how intermediaries contribute to the transfer and development of knowledge. By empirically highlighting brokerage in general, brokers of the actual network can be compared to others in other industry networks and thus can be valued. In general, the research contributes to theory on mediation processes, alliances, social capital, network dynamics, SMEs and innovation. Practical Implications The study contributes to the efficiency of knowledge creation and exchange in dynamic industries, especially across sectors. It contributes to the design and high-tech industries in particular. The research is the first attempt to actually construct the design and high-tech network in a social network way. No such data was available before in the Netherlands. Chapter two shows that increases of efforts of various parties to establish co-operations between the two industries seem to work. The triple helix between companies, governmental institutions and science organizations is well present in this network. In policy terms these are interesting findings. Despite the positive results, policy makers may reflect on these findings in terms of improving their interventions in the economic structure of the region even more. Results of Chapter two and three imply that SMEs should get involved in projects in the non-profit or science sector. Chapter three also shows that SMEs or even non-profit organizations whose brokerage capacity is not in line with their ambitions should invest in connections with branch experienced people with a broad knowledge base. From a non-profit consultant point of view these findings are also interesting. They often have difficulties in proving their successes. Sometimes merely mentioning contact information leads to a successful match. Sometimes brokerage takes much time and effort and still the involved parties are dissatisfied. Moreover the effectiveness of non-profit organizations, like branch associations, is subject to discussion in the Netherlands. This research shows that the intervention of non-profit consultants (eventually) is of value to companies. Traditional supply-side innovation policies seem to be insufficient to meet the challenges posed in promoting competitiveness. At the European Union level interest is focused on public procurement as a means to spur innovation. Measurement at individual level gives a profound picture of actual contributions of government expenditures. It is now possible to review policy from the bottom up. Chapter four shows that brokers are involved in exploration of an opportunity together with others, but generally are not involved in exploitation of an opportunity; the building of efficient business systems for full-scale operations. The focus on exploration of information indicates that the time spend on brokerage is important, but the results are not predictable. The non-profit and science sector should be aware that the efficiency of this work is not predictable and should take this awareness into account when timetables are being made. The profit sector should be aware that investments without secure profit are necessary. Brokerage is labor with delayed profits; at the moment of investment it is still unclear if payment will be possible and who will pay in the end. The results also imply that co-developing and coordinating projects concerned with commercialization of exploration outcomes over time, may be interesting to stimulate in this field. Furthermore since people of the non-profit and science sector can not operate in the competitive field, the research findings imply that an important role can be fulfilled by people in the profit sector. SMEs can strengthen their broker capacity by leaping in on projects related to the commercialization of outcomes.
Il commercio equo e solidale (Cees) è andato sviluppandosi nel mondo occidentale nel corso degli ultimi quaranta anni, quale risposta alla crescente consapevolezza del fatto che i vantaggi derivanti dagli scambi e dall'espansione del commercio internazionale non risultano equamente ripartiti tra tutti i Paesi e tra i vari strati della popolazione di ciascuno dei Paesi stessi. La progressiva estensione del fenomeno in termini di ampliamento delle aree geografiche coperte e di aumento del quantitativo e delle tipologie dei beni commerciati, nonché il proliferare dei soggetti coinvolti e la loro stessa eterogeneità ha via via evidenziato le potenzialità connesse a tale realtà divenuta, nel corso di pochi decenni, da settore di nicchia, modello di riferimento per un commercio giusto nel panorama internazionale di mercato. Orbene, allo scopo di inquadrare precisamente il fenomeno e di sviscerarne i contenuti si è ritenuto opportuno suddividere la trattazione del tema in quattro macro-blocchi inerenti rispettivamente: la descrizione socio-economica del Cees, i progetti di normazione presenti in materia a livello sovranazionale-nazionale e regionale, le altre esperienze parallelamente sviluppate in altri paesi europei, nonché l'analisi degli strumenti contrattuali in uso nel settore con particolare riguardo ai contratti di Ctm. Il punto di partenza è rappresentato da una serie di considerazioni di ordine introduttivo, con particolare riguardo alla dimensione socio-economica del fenomeno, alla luce della sua crescente evoluzione e del suo attuale valore in termini di incidenza all'interno del nuovo ordine globale delle relazioni economiche. A seguire, dato il taglio essenzialmente giuridico della ricerca, si è ritenuto opportuno penetrare immediatamente la realtà del commercio equo con specifico riferimento alle problematiche ed alle prospettive connesse all'opportunità di una regolamentazione giuridica del fenomeno stesso, le quali costituiscono, precisamente, l'oggetto centrale del presente studio. In particolare si è scelto di elaborare una serie di riflessioni introduttive a proposito dei differenti approcci posti in essere in materia, considerando la complessità del quadro di riferimento nonché la varietà degli intenti. Orbene, nel tentativo di ricostruire le ragioni che hanno determinato l'esigenza di regolamentare la materia, si è pensato in primo luogo di esaminare i numerosi tentativi di autoregolamentazione attuati in tal senso, con riferimento da un lato alle cc. dd. Carte dei Criteri ed in particolare alla Carta Italiana, elaborate allo scopo di identificare i requisiti ed i soggetti destinati ad operare in tale contesto, e dall'altro lato ai sistemi di certificazione privati e specializzati posti in essere allo scopo di etichettare i prodotti del Cees e garantire così la conformità a determinati standard, nonché il rispetto dei principi propri del settore in esame. Una volta esaminati i percorsi inerenti la via dell'autoregolamentazione e le peculiarità connesse agli stessi si è ritenuto interessante procedere nell'analisi dei percorsi di eteroregolamentazione posti in essere in materia, e ciò in particolare sulla scorta dei limiti e delle incongruenze intrinsecamente legate alla strada dell'autodisciplina. La creazione di un preciso schema legislativo in materia, corrispondente ad una vera e propria legge, consentirebbe, infatti - ed è precisamente ciò che la ricerca è tesa a dimostrare - di realizzare, al di là del riconoscimento ufficiale del fenomeno, anche una specifica individuazione dei prodotti del Cees e dei soggetti coinvolti, ciò che determinerebbe, attraverso l'istituzione di un rigoroso sistema sanzionatorio, la conseguente eliminazione del rischio che gli stessi si trovino in un certo senso a miscelarsi inconsapevolmente con soggetti estranei ai principi del movimento, traducendosi implicitamente in una enorme garanzia per il consumatore. Una volta accertata la necessità di regolamentare la materia e una volta enucleate le motivazioni attraverso le quali si è giunti ad affermare la preferenza di soluzioni di tipo eteroregolamentative, si è scelto di proseguire nell'analisi dettagliata dei percorsi e degli interventi legislativi elaborati su scala sovranazionale, nazionale e regionale; ciò al fine di riflettere più compiutamente sul taglio che un intervento regolativo in materia dovrebbe avere. I paragrafi elaborati nell'ambito della Parte II e precisamente inerenti una ricognizione e valutazione critica dei progetti di normazione presenti in materia, si muovono in effetti proprio in tale ottica, nel tentativo di chiarire se, posta la complessità degli interventi legislativi predisposti a vari livelli, sia ravvisabile all'interno di uno di questi un possibile modello da seguire. Sempre allo scopo di riflettere sui profili regolamentativi del fenomeno del Cees e posta la necessità di rintracciare un modello indicativo sulla base del quale pervenire all'elaborazione di un preciso schema di inquadramento legislativo, si è scelto di dedicare le successive fasi della ricerca all'esame delle esperienze maggiormente rilevanti nel settore condotte all'interno di altri paesi. La terza parte-sezione del lavoro di ricerca si incentra, infatti, sull'analisi degli schemi e delle soluzioni legislative elaborate a livello europeo (e non solo) in tale ambito, ciò allo scopo di valutare le affinità e le compatibilità, ma anche eventualmente le divergenze esistenti rispetto al nostro sistema. Ebbene, a parte lo studio delle strategie tracciate all'interno del contesto europeo, ed in modo particolare in paesi come la Spagna e la Francia - attraverso l'analisi delle varie proposte e normative concretamente poste in essere - si è ritenuto interessante proporre anche l'esame di una realtà profondamente differente, sia per struttura che per impostazione, quale, appunto, quella canadese, e ciò considerato in particolare anche il carattere innovativo di una indagine comparata tra le due dimensioni (quella italiana e quella, appunto, canadese). Alla luce di tali considerazioni, nonché allo scopo di rendere effettivamente concreti i profili teorici anzi sviluppati, si è scelto di completare la ricerca mediante l'analisi di alcuni contratti commerciali, utilizzati nella pratica degli affari e recanti appunto norme rispettose dei principi del Cees. In particolare, l'ultima sezione del lavoro, inerente temi di giustizia sociale e diritto dei contratti - con specifico riferimento alla disciplina giuridica del contratto inteso appunto quale mezzo attraverso cui orientare il corretto funzionamento del mercato concorrenziale e fornire adeguate tutele ai consumatori - si sofferma sull'analisi della modulistica contrattuale (Il "Fair Trade Partnership Agreement"; l'"Annual Plan"; il "Fair Trade Purchasing Contract"; il "Delivery Order") utilizzata da Ctm Altromercato nelle operazioni di acquisto, nonché di trasporto e vendita dei prodotti equo-solidali. Tale modulistica, reperita grazie ad una profonda collaborazione con la sede legale del Consorzio, è stata ritenuta particolarmente interessante sotto un duplice profilo: da una parte, infatti, tali strumenti contrattuali potrebbero rappresentare una effettiva garanzia per quel consumatore socialmente responsabile che voglia visionarli al fine di constatare direttamente il rispetto di determinati standard e principi e che voglia, cioè, accertare che i prodotti che acquista siano effettivamente rispettosi di quegli standard; dall'altra parte, tali contratti rappresenterebbero una sorta di garanzia sociale, vale a dire un mezzo attraverso il quale far rispettare i suddetti valori e recuperare, in una prospettiva più ampia, anche determinati diritti. ; The fair trade phenomenon expanded in the western world during the last forty years because the benefits of trade and the expansion of international trade are not equitably distributed among all countries and between different levels of population. The gradual extension of phenomenon, the expansion of the geographic areas covered, the increase of quantity and types of traded goods and the proliferation of actors, gradually showed the strength related to this reality, which has become, in a few years, a true reference model for a fair trade on the international market. However, in order to classify precisely the phenomenon and to reveal its contents, it was considered appropriate to divide the discussion of the topic into four macro-blocks, respectively associated to: -the socio-economic description of the fair trade; -the different standardization projects elaborated in this field at the supranational, national and regional levels; -the other experiences developed in a comparative perspective with other European countries (and not only); -the analysis of contractual instruments used in the sector with particular regard to the contracts used by CTM Altromercato. The starting point is represented by some different preliminary considerations, with special emphasis on socio-economic phenomenon, considering its increasing trend and its current value in terms of incidence on the new global order of economic relations. Secondly, as legal research, it was considered appropriate to immediately penetrate the reality of fair trade, with specific reference to the problems and prospects related to the best legal regulation of this phenomenon, which represents the central object of this study. In particular, we chose to develop some general discussion about the different approaches elaborated in this area, considering the complexity of the framework and the variety of proposals. However, reconstructing the underlying reasons for a legal adjustment of this phenomenon, it was thought primarily to examine the many attempts to self-regulation, referring firstly to the "Carte dei Criteri" and especially the "Carta Italiana", drawn up to identify the requirements and the people suitable to operate in that context, and secondly concerning the private certification schemes, specialized in this field, and created to label the products of fair trade and thus to ensure compliance with standards and respect for the principles of the sector. After examining the pathways of self-regulation and the peculiarities connected to the same, it was considered interesting to carry out the analysis of a different form of regulation, called "heteroregulation", considering, in particular, the limitations and inconsistencies intrinsically linked to the self-discipline. In fact, the creation of a clear legislative framework, corresponding to a real law, would- and this is precisely what the research is oriented to prove - to establish, in addition to official recognition of the phenomenon, the specific identification of the fair trade products and of the parties involved and moreover, establishing a strict system of sanctions, to realize the subsequent elimination of the risk that they are, unconsciously, mixed with persons outside the principles of the movement, meaning a huge guarantee for the consumers. Once we have established the need to regulate this field and once outlined the reasons for a preference of heteroregolamentative type solutions, it was interesting to analyze the detailed paths and the legislative actions drawn up at the supranational , national and regional level, to reflect more broadly on the style that a regulatory intervention in this area would have. The paragraphs elaborated in the II part, concerning a critical evaluation of the projects of regulation existing in this context, want to clarify if, considering the complexity of the sector, a potential model to follow exists. Thirdly, in order to reflect on the regulation profiles of fair trade phenomenon and considering the need to find a legislative framework, it was chosen to dedicate the next stages of research to examine of the most important experiences carried on in this field from other countries. The third part-section of the research is focused on the analysis of legislative solutions developed at European level (and not only) in this context; the aim is to value the similarities and the compatibility, but also the differences, compared to our system. In addiction to the study of strategies, outlined in the European context, and particularly in the countries like Spain and France - through the analysis of various proposals and regulations put in practice - it was considered interesting to propose also the examination of Canadian perspective, considering in particular the innovative nature of a comparative study between these two dimensions (Italian and Canadian). For these considerations and to realize the theoretical profile, it was decided to complete the research with the analysis of some commercial contracts, which are used in the practice of business and containing the fair trade rules and the principles. In particular, the last section of work, concerning the social justice issues and the law of contracts - with particular reference to the legal framework of the contract conceived like an instrument to ensuring the proper functioning of the competitive market and protect consumers - is focused on the analysis of contractual forms ( "Fair Trade Partnership Agreement", "Annual Plan, "Fair Trade Purchasing Contract" and "Delivery Order") used by CTM Altromercato in transactions of purchase, transportation and sale of fair trade products. These contracts, obtained thanks to a strong collaboration with the legal office of the Consortium CTM Altromercato, were considered particularly interesting: first of all, these instruments could be a contractual guarantee for a consumer socially responsible, who wants to view them and to observe directly the relevance of these standards and principles, and to ensure that the products meet those standards; on the other hand, these contracts represent a kind of social security, namely an instrument to enforce these values and also to recover, in a broader perspective, specific rights.
1. General observations Africa south of the Sahara is probably the most vulnerable region when it comes to the impact and consequences of climate changes. Yet the African continent runs a serious risk of being marginalized in the global dialogue on climate issues. Africa contributes little to the global emissions of CO2, and other greenhouse gases. The major focus of the Framework Convention on Climate Change is on abatement and mitigation of emissions rather than adaptation to the consequences of climate change, and African states have therefore been slow to ratify the treaty and not as active in the international negotiation process as states from other parts of the world. Curbing emissions if justifiably not a central African concern. Yet Africa's potential vulnerability should demand attention from both African policy makers and other decision makers. Africa's natural resource base is seriously threatened. The two central guiding principles of African climate policy both on the part of governments and of international institutions should be reducing vulnerability on the one hand and increasing resilience on the other. Decision makers should not use the remaining scientific uncertainty and the acknowledged dearth of detailed information on African resource management as an excuse for inaction. Not taking climate change into account could be a serious source of mismanagement and fallacious planning. Both increase in temperature and increasing variability of climate are serious dangers in the future. Land degradation policies as well as future energy development should be central concerns. Any strategy for Africa should seek to minimize the potential conflicts among the concerns and priorities for development, adaptation and abatement. Africa's vulnerability to climatic changes relates to a number of factors, including 1) the dependency on bio-fuel, 2) the importance of agriculture, 3) immobility, 4) poor health services, 5) population growth, and 6) low material standards. In the case of Africa, it is difficult to make clear distinctions between abatement and adaptation measures. Social and economic development are necessary in order to prepare the continent for adaptation. 2. African obligations and opportunities under the Climate Convention Forty-nine African states have signed the Climate Convention, but only 33 have ratified so far (23.06.95). Ratification is important because- 1) it signifies the acceptance of the principles of the convention and 2) ratification will be required for financial support under the FCCC. The substantive obligation of all African Parties is a commitment to formulate a climate policy and how it could be implemented. Developing countries shall report on their inventories of GHG emissions, along with their plans and measures to meet the convention's objective within three years after the entry into force of the convention. Least-developed countries may report at their own discretion. Multilateral financing institutions should invest in data gathering on all levels to enhance awareness and improve the possibility for responsible governance in respect to natural resource management and environmental protection. Joint Implementation (JI) can allow for cost effective implementation of the Climate Convention, and provide funding for climate related projects for countries where financial resources are scarce or lacking. 3. Modeling of climate change in Africa There are still substantial limitations in the ability to provide accurate predictions of future climate in Africa. Confidence in regional model predictions is low and there are substantial differences between the models. One can distinguish between three regions when it comes to climatic changes in Africa: 1) Sahel region, 2) corresponding dry regions south of the Equator in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, etc., and 3) the tropical region centered around the Equator. Major findings from IPCC -90 and -92 of relevance for Africa Temperature. Expected increases in annual average surface temperature at the time of C02 doubling: Northern subtropical region (including Sahel): 2 degrees Celsisus (0.5-3.0 degrees Celsisus), Tropical region: 1.5 degrees Celsisus (0.5-2.5 degrees Celsisus), and Southern subtropical region: 2 degrees Celsisus (0.5-3.0 degrees Celsisus). Precipitation: Increase in surface temperature and increased radiative cooling of the atmosphere due to doubling of CO2, concentrations lead to increased evaporation at the surface and increased intensity of convective precipitation (e.g. thunderstorms from large cumulus towers). Sea level rise: Thermal expansion is regarded as the most important process. Predictions are a 20±10cm increase in sea level at the time of CO2, doubling. IPCC-90 estimates up to a 65cm increase in sea level in year 2100, but this number is likely to be decreased to 40~45cm in the new IPCC-95 report. Observed trends. Since 1895, annual average temperatures has increased by 0.53'C over continental Africa. The recent 25 year dry period in Sahel is the most substantial change in observed precipitation in the global record. Explanations have been sought in 1) land use changes, and 2) circulation changes caused by changing patterns of sea surface temperatures (SST). If the drought represents the first sign of a global warming remains however uncertain. Current anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGS) in Africa. 1) Carbon dioxide (CO2): The major source is land use change (~70); the rest originates mainly from industry and transportation. The African contribution of CO2, was in 1990 estimated to be about 7 0f the world's total. 2) Methane (CH4,): Emissions in Africa are about 7 0f the world's total, with livestock being the main source. Industrial sources are oil and gas production and coal mining. 3) Nitrous oxide (N2O) sources are mainly of natural origin. 3) Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC): Africa's share of global CFC emissions is estimated at 3. 4. Natural resource management The uncertainties in predicting climate change impacts in Africa must be underlined, and other human or natural influences may mitigate or exacerbate the effects. Natural variability in Africa is also substantial, and people are to a large extent adapted to changes. Still, predicted human-induced climatic changes are expected to occur very rapidly, and little is known about the capability of the ecosystems - which forms the basis for human existence - to adapt to such changes. It is also clear that impacts of climate change will be unevenly distributed: groups with the highest present vulnerability, such as poor people and people living in marginal areas, will most likely suffer most. Generally, changes in the frequency of extreme weather events would probably have greater impact than changes in average conditions. Agricultural Resources. The fertilizing effect of enhanced CO2 level on plant growth is well documented in laboratory studies, but disputed when it comes to complex "real-world" systems. Other factors concerning climate change impacts on agriculture include 1) Warmer climate and changes in rainfall may reduce the appropriability of present crops. Already being a major problem today, loss of crop and livestock genetic resources may threaten sustainable agricultural development and adaptations to future changes. 2) Increased intensity of rainfall may increase soil erosion, nutrient leaching and crop damage, 3) Changes in timing and length of growing seasons may lead to planning problems, 4) Loss of rainfall in marginal and vulnerable areas would exacerbate drought and desiccation problems, increase risks for bushfire and put forests at their dry margins at risk, and increase problems in animal husbandry, 5) Some models predict a noticeable loss of food production in Africa, but regional variations would probably be large, and local differences (such as in cropping systems) will to a large extent determine how significant the climate change impacts will be. 6) Sea level rise will put low lying agricultural areas at risk, and may render major rivers unsuitable for irrigation. Fish resources. Fish make up a significant part of the food supply in Africa, with a total harvest potential estimated at 10.5 million tons. It is expected that global warming will, varying with species, relocate fish populations. Freshwater populations in small rivers and lakes are vulnerable due to restricted ability to move in response to changes. In areas becoming drier, loss of habitat would also represent a threat. Fish populations are generally very sensitive to even small changes in frequency of extreme events. For the more mobile marine fish populations, relocation does not necessarily mean that production and potential yields are lowered, but subsistence and small scale-fishermen may suffer if institutional arrangements do not enable them to move within regions and across boundaries. Biodiversity. Impacts on biological diversity should be of particular concern, as the welfare of human beings strongly depends on the existence of biological systems and processes. Biological diversity provides a wide range of goods and services, including a genetic basis for agricultural development, and represents a heritage of unique species and ecosystems. Species will probably respond differentially to climatic changes, leading to new aggregations and ecosystems. In ecological terms, the predicted changes will occur over a short period of time. Migration is expected to be the main adaptation strategy, and adaptation success will be determined by the species' ability to respond quickly enough, as well as the suitability of the migration routes: Migration may be blocked by natural or human imposed barriers, or the natural environment (e.g. soils) may be inappropriate. A large part of the natural bio-diversity in Africa is confined to isolated reserves surrounded by agricultural land. Small populations are particularly vulnerable, and endemic species will be at risk of extinction. The changes would on the other hand favor species with high dispersal rates, ability to colonize a wide range of habitats and a high tolerance towards stress. Water resources. Past droughts have shown that for marginal and vulnerable areas, even a small reduction in water supply is critical. Water scarcity has substantial health and ecological consequences. Even today, there is growing scarcity of water in many African regions, and several countries rely on water originating outside their borders. Sea level rises can be expected to lead to increased saltwater intrusion in the groundwater. Desalinization is too costly for most countries. Hydro power generation is also vulnerable to temperature increases and rainfall changes. Social, political and economic impacts. Many authors mention the risk of getting more "eco-refugees". In addition to the social and health problems they may create, major migrations would also increase political tensions. Economic impacts include costs of climate-caused damages and costs of adapting to climate changes. In low-lying areas, sea level rise may cause substantial losses of land for human habitation, which in river deltas and urban centers will be aggravated by subsidence caused by extraction of water and hydrocarbons. 5. African priorities African policy statements emphasize that contributions to Climate Change mitigation efforts should not adversely affect their development targets. Few African countries have national policies explicitly aimed at combating climate change impacts, as they are not required to develop such plans until 1997. African policies are expected to concentrate on combating vulnerability. More specifically, this involves capacity building in a number of areas, including formulation of national and regional inventories and programs, development of effective negotiation skills, developing research capabilities, conducting cost-benefit analyses, and capacity building in the area of technology assessment and transfer. Improvement in planning capacity and governance would improve Africa's resilience to eventual climate changes. Future energy scenarios. African countries should get support in taking advantage of new technology for alternative energy resources, where no-regret options should be given priority. It should be underlined that effective mitigation measures against global warming must reinforce national economic policies and enhance the welfare of households. Three different energy scenarios for Africa are discussed: 1) Stagnation, 2) Growth based on fossil fuels, and 3) Sustainable growth. Scenario 1 is characterized by slow economic development and rapid population growth. Scenarios 2 and 3 involve high social and economic development and falling fertility rates. Scenario 2 is a fossilfuels based development, while scenario 3 provides large scale use of alternative energy sources and sustainable economic development. Economic development and improved living standards, especially among women, are necessary to reduce population growth. Abatement measures. Abatement measures may be carried out as part of a development strategy. Such no-regret options may however need additional funding to be carried out, since market failures and national constraints to the economy may make such options too costly for African governments. One should focus on measures with limited impacts on activities "outside" the market economy. The concern for climate change could make the support of new technology in Africa more attractive, but one should be aware that this may bias the countries' preferences for projects.
Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Climate change represents an ongoing threat, not only since it attracted growing media attention in recent years. Therefore, scientists urge to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to prevent most disastrous consequences. One method, chosen by the international community to achieve this reduction and therewith mitigate global warming, is via the establishment of so called carbon markets. Most famous example is probably the European Emissions Trade System (EU ETS), where pollution allowances can be exchanged among actors. The reduction then is achieved by the setting of a ceiling or cap by authorities. Besides, there are also voluntary carbon markets where actors aim at reducing emissions with self-imposed targets. Objective of this paper will be to elucidate this unregulated market for carbon commodities and understand its functioning. Since voluntary carbon trading was largely criticised for a lack of quality and transparency, methods to overcome such weaknesses shall be presented and evaluated as well. Beginning with an overview of different systems of carbon trading, the reader will subsequently learn about existing and emerging carbon markets, their characteristics and performance. Notably compliance and non-mandatory schemes will be distinguished. Juxtaposition will allow for evaluating strengths and weaknesses of both systems. For gaining an understanding of the supply chain in the voluntary carbon market and comprehend underlying motivations, a presentation of market players will follow in the second chapter. Based on market actors' motives, a model for 'high quality' carbon commodities will be established in the third part, whereby criticism is also taken into account. An examination of instruments to enhance quality and to overcome shortcomings of non-mandatory markets will be examined in the following. The fourth chapter will provide an evaluation of and an outlook on the beforehand discussed quality mechanisms. Additionally, different scenarios will be developed in order to predict the future of voluntary carbon trading.Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: Acknowledgementsii Executive Summaryiii Table of Figuresx Table of Boxesxi Abbreviations and Acronymsxi Introduction1 1.An Overview of Existing Carbon Markets2 1.1Regulated Markets4 1.1.1The Kyoto Protocol4 1.1.2European Emissions Trading Scheme6 1.1.3Other Planned Trading Schemes under the Kyoto Protocol7 1.1.4Australia, finally committing to Kyoto8 1.1.5North American Initiatives9 1.2Unregulated Carbon Markets10 1.2.1Chicago Climate Exchange and Australia Climate Exchange10 1.2.2Functioning of Voluntary Carbon Markets11 1.2.3Market Volume and Prices13 1.2.4Market Dispersion14 1.2.5Project Types and Locations16 1.3Innovation or Security - Choice of Voluntary or Compliance Market18 2.Along the Supply Chain of Carbon Offsetting - Market Players26 2.1Project Developers27 2.2Verification Organisations30 2.2.1Verification and Labelling31 2.2.2Verifying the Verifiers - Greenpeace and Co.32 2.3Offset Suppliers33 2.3.1Non Profit Sellers - Changing the World for a Better35 2.3.2Brokers and Consultants - Drivers for Innovation36 2.3.3Investment Banks, Funds and Speculators - Important Investors38 2.3.4Wholesalers and Retailers - Profit Seeking Middlemen40 2.3.5Companies - Jumping on the Carbon Neutral Train41 2.4Purchasers of Carbon Offsets44 2.4.1Individuals - Underrepresented Target Group47 2.4.2Business - Most Attractive Large-Scale Purchasers48 2.4.3Events - Accounting for Carbon Footprints49 2.4.4Public Institutions and Governments - Combining Efforts towards a Low-Carbon Society50 2.4.5NGO's - Sceptic Customers51 3.Instruments for Quality Enhancement52 3.1Criticism and Problems of the Voluntary Market55 3.2Standards and Labels60 3.3Registries62 3.4Carbon Exchanges64 3.5Governmental Action65 3.5.1Sensitisation of the public66 3.5.2Regulatory framework66 3.5.3Initiator for Action67 3.6Guides and Codes68 3.7Credit Ratings70 3.8Managerial Approaches towards Quality71 3.8.1Benchmarking72 3.8.2Strategic Alliances73 3.8.3Environmental Risk Management74 3.8.4Green Teams75 4.Evaluation of Quality Instruments and Perspectives76 4.1Evaluation of Quality Instruments77 4.2Review on Experts' Opinions towards the Future of Voluntary Offsetting82 4.2.1Investors See Necessity to Overcome Structural Barricades82 4.2.2Consultants Predict Continued Growth83 4.2.3Conservationists Call for Faster and Deeper Change84 4.2.4Offset Suppliers Lack Overarching Market Information85 4.3Scenario 1: An Overregulated Voluntary Market86 4.4Scenario 2: A Supply Driven Market87 4.5Scenario 3: A Demand Driven Market89 4.6Scenario 4: Aligning Supply and Demand90 Conclusion95 Glossaryxii BibliographyxivTextprobe:Text Sample: Chapter 2.4.1, Individuals – Underrepresented Target Group: Voluntary offsetting provides individual consumers with the possibility to account for their personal carbon footprint. Compliance markets do not allow for such transactions due to structural restraints. For reducing or neutralising individual emissions, consumers may: - either purchase offsets directly from retailers; - or make environmentally conscious purchase decisions, as for instance with the ClimateSmart™ program from PGE. Retailers generally provide a so called carbon calculator on their websites. Therewith, consumers can determine the amount of carbon produced by their activities and purchase the corresponding amount of offsets. Mostly, this is done for air travel, but increasingly for domestic activities, too. Second option is the participation in offset programs, increasingly offered by businesses, or the choice of offset products (as for instance financial services, see section 2.3.5 on Companies – Jumping on the Carbon Neutral Train). Though, a discrepancy between consumers' commitments and actions has been observed by recent research. The GfK Rauper Green Gauge study concerning US consumer's behaviour for instance found that 82% of Americans claim to be seriously concerned about environmental issues, whereas only 28% made corresponding purchases during the last two months (Makover 3). With view on the country's objective to become 'carbon neutral', Norway's environmentalist Frederic Hauge sharply points on the mayor problem of most developed countries: 'We are a nice little country of petroholics and that has made us lazy', Frederic Hauge, head of Norway's largest environmental monitoring organisation Bellona. Therefore, incentives have to be created in order to further motivate individuals to change their high-carbon habits. The UK government for instance considers the introduction of a personal carbon trading scheme. But how can this target group be stimulated via market mechanisms? Harris' survey among retailers suggested that price and additional benefits are prevailing decision factors for consumers of this supplier group. Quality concerns seemed to be less important. Weakness of this study is that retailer's customers are not solely individuals and the small size of the sample (26 answers). Nevertheless, one may deduce that for motivating individuals to become more active on the voluntary carbon market, businesses have to offer products with added environmental value at low prices. This can be achieved by means of already mentioned strategic partnerships. Thus, a greater choice of offset products or commodities with the option to offset will stimulate individuals to increasingly participate in the voluntary carbon market. Another quality enhancing tool is education and transparency to gain credibility. The better informed consumers are, the more likely they will decide for offset products. Business – Most Attractive Large-Scale Purchasers: Besides the above discussed possibility to sell carbon credits, businesses may also purchase offsets. Dell or the often cited HSBC bank are just a small selection of examples for voluntary offsetters. Three forms of participation exist: Firstly, entities aiming at neutralising emissions from corporate operations for corporate social responsibility reasons. The second group comprises businesses purchasing carbon credits for resale, either in regard of future regulations or for profit reasons, see previous section. Third possibility for corporations to act as purchasers is to neutralise product life cycle emissions for offering 'carbon neutral' commodities. As evaluated before, major motives are corporate social responsibility and image concerns. Additionally, the discovered wish for valuable offsets will drive the development of projects with high quality features and co benefits, depending on the entity's purposes. Similarly to individuals, businesses are not yet 'walking their talk'. A McKinsey survey found that 60% of global executives consider climate change as important issue. Almost the same amount (61%) even acknowledges that with the right management such issues may have 'a positive effect on profits'. Though, solely 30% 'frequently or always consider climate change in overall strategy'. The study also confirms observations that entities are influenced by factors such as 'corporate reputation, media attention to climate change, and customer preferences'. Despite the perceptible discrepancy between words and actions, corporate offset buyers will lead the drive towards quality in unregulated carbon markets, in order to maintain credibility face to their customers. Events – Accounting for Carbon Footprints: Not only corporations account for their carbon footprints, event organisers also discover this tool for attracting media attention or mitigating negative environmental effects. The role of events in the carbon market, if there is any; correspond to awareness raising and education. As examples hereof may be named the Life Earth concerts, the UNFCCC conference in Bali 2007, the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 or the FIFA Soccer World Cup two years earlier in Germany which are claiming to be 'carbon neutral'. Since event related offsetting intends to communicate and raise awareness, public and event participants need to understand projects easily. Therefore, carbon credits are chosen according to their public appeal. For instance forestation is a comprehensible and easily marketable action. Projects with additional benefits are also preferred for their communication possibilities. So, event organisers will rather support 'charismatic' offset projects. Public Institutions and Governments – Combining Efforts towards a Low-Carbon Society: What role do public actors play in an unregulated market? Since regulation potentially restricts the voluntary carbon market, governments are reluctant to act in this regard. However, in the UK research and dialogue is undertaken to design a profitable and market oriented framework, see Box 5 below for more information. As purchasers of carbon credits, governments only play a minor role with 0.4% of transactions effected in 2007. Nevertheless, announcements of towns, communes and even entire countries to become 'carbon neutral' do not cease. In February 2008 for instance, the United Nations Environment Programme announced the launch of a Climate Neutral Network. New Zealand, Iceland, Costa Rica and the world's third largest oil exporter Norway joined this initiative to reduce emissions to zero with together four towns and five corporations.
Euroopan unioni ja sen jäsenvaltiot ovat tuoneet viime vuosina toistuvasti esiin, että eurooppalainen tiedepolitiikka on yhteydessä taloudelliseen kasvuun. Eurooppalaisten kansallisvaltioiden intressissä onkin nykyään noudattaa sellaisia tiedepoliittisia malleja ja käytäntöjä, jotka edesauttavat niiden taloudellista kasvua ja kukoistusta. Tässä kehityksessä erityisen kiinnostavaa on, että valtiot ympäri Eurooppaa ovat omaksuneet keskenään samankaltaisia tiedepoliittisia ajatusmalleja, käytäntöjä ja politiikkoja, vaikka niiden taloudelliset tilanteet ja rakenteet ovat erilaisia. Kyseessä on maailmanlaajuinen trendi. Tiede ja tieto ovat lukuisten Euroopan unionin strategioiden ytimessä ja niillä nähdään olevat erityinen rooli eurooppalaisen menestyksen ja kilpailukyvyn kehityksessä. Euroopan unioni yhtyy siis globaaleihin tiedepoliittisiin diskursseihin ja siirtyy muualla aiemmin käyttöönotettuihin malleihin, vaikka EU on omanlaisensa verrattuna muihin maanosiin ja poliittisiin liittoutumiin. Eurooppalaista tiedepolitiikkaa koskeva usein rationaalisiin selitysmalleihin pohjautuva tutkimus ei pysty täysin selittämään tätä ilmiötä. Ensinnä funktionaaliset selitysmallit eivät kykene selittämään yhdenmukaista ja samanaikaista eurooppalaista poliittisten diskurssien ja valintojen kehitystä. Taloudelliselta rakenteeltaan ja kooltaan erilaiset yhteiskunnat kohtaavat erilaisia haasteita. Jos poliittiset valinnat vastaisivat yhteiskuntien yksilöllisiä tarpeita, olisi todennäköistä, että ratkaisut, mieltymykset ja toimenpiteet eroaisivat toisistaan. Toisaalta rationaaliset selitysmallit, jotka lähtevät siitä oletuksesta, että valtiot tekevät laskelmoituja valintoja kansallisten intressiensä pohjalta, eivät perustu todellisuuteen. Jos perustuisivat, kansalliset toimijat noudattaisivat työssään niitä päätöksiä, joita heidän päätöksentekijänsä ovat kansallisten intressien pohjalta tehneet. Käytännössä kuitenkin yksi merkittävimmistä eurooppalaisen tiedepolitiikan tavoitteista eli tutkimusrahoituksen yhdentyminen, jota Euroopan jäsenvaltioiden valtionpäämiehet ovat ajaneet yhdessä 2000-luvun alusta asti, ei ole toteutunut. Kansalliset tutkimuksen rahoittajat eivät siis ole toteuttaneet niitä tavoitteita, jotka heidän omat päätöksentekijänsä ovat eurooppalaisella tasolla asettaneet. Näin ollen näkemys huolellisen laskelmoinnin pohjalta tehdystä kansallisiin intresseihin perustuvasta suoraviivaisesti täytäntöönpanoon etenevästä päätöksenteosta voidaan kyseenalaistaa. Rationalistinen selitysmalli ennustaa, että kokemus aiemmista toimenpiteistä ohjaa päätöksiä tulevaisuudessa. Kun yhteiseurooppalainen tutkimusrahoitus on jäänyt vähäiseksi, myös sen mukanaan tuoma ennakoitu taloudellinen hyöty on jäänyt toteutumatta. Tästä huolimatta Euroopan jäsenvaltioiden halukkuus ottaa osaa tiedepoliittisiin yhteistyömuotoihin ei ole vähentynyt. Tämä havainto osoittaa, että rationaalinen, materiaalisiin ja taloudellisiin hyötyihin keskittyvä laskelmointi ei täysin selitä kansallisten osapuolten halukkuutta osallistua eurooppalaiseen tutkimusrahoitusyhteistyöhön. Koska tiedepoliittinen yhteistyö perustuu vapaaehtoisuuteen, eikä Euroopan unionilla ole välineitä pakottaa jäsenvaltioitaan toimimaan yhdenmukaisin tavoin, ei ilmiötä voida selittää pakolla. Tarvitaan siis uudenlaisia tapoja ymmärtää, miksi jäsenvaltiot käyttävät politiikoissaan yhdenmukaisia tiedepoliittisia diskursseja, ja miksi kansalliset toimijat ottavat niin innokkaasti osaa eurooppalaiseen tutkimusrahoitusyhteistyöhön sen epäonnistumisista huolimatta. Tässä väitöskirjassa näihin mysteereihin esitetään kulttuurisosiologiseen näkökulmaan pohjautuva selitys. Kansallisvaltiot, kansalliset poliittiset toimijat ja tutkimusrahoituksen toimihenkilöt nähdään kulttuurisia käsikirjoituksia noudattavina toimijoina, jotka sulautuvat sekä heitä ympäröiviin että heidät rakentaviin sosiaalisiin rakenteisiin. Tämä ymmärrys, josta osa on globaalisti jaettua maailmankulttuuria, sekä rajoittaa että mahdollistaa heidän toimintansa. Se tarjoaa heille joukon tärkeitä institutionaalisia sääntöjä, käsikirjoituksia ja periaatteita, joita heidän tulee noudattaa saavuttaakseen ja säilyttääkseen oma yhteiskunnallinen asemansa. Käsikirjoitusten olemassaolo auttaa selittämään, miksi poliittiset mallit, ideat ja diskurssit leviävät tuottaen ylikansallista yhdenmukaisuutta, kun rationaaliset selitysmallit eivät siihen kykene. Sosiaalisesti jaettujen käyttäytymismallien ja käsikirjoitusten esiintuominen on tyypillistä erityisesti maailmanyhteiskunnantutkijoille ja sosiologiseen institutionalismiin perustuvalle tutkimukselle. Tämäkin tutkimus pohjautuu näihin perinteisiin, mutta esittää niihin täsmennyksen tuottamalla entistä tarkempaa tietoa siitä, miten paikalliset toimijat motivoivat toimintansa itselleen ja muille. Tutkimus vastaa kysymykseen analysoimalla, miten kansalliset toimitsijat identifioivat itsensä ja miten heidän tekemänsä identiteettityö tarjoaa tarkemman selityksen prosessille, joka maailmanyhteiskunnantutkimuksen makroperspektiivistä näyttää mukautumiselta. Tutkimuksen tuottamien tulosten valossa tarkoituksettomalta näyttäytyvä mukautuminen eli konformismi onkin itse asiassa identiteettikategorioihin yhteydessä olevaa päämäärätietoista, intresseihin perustuvaa toimintaa. Samalla tutkimuksessa osoitetaan, miten paikallisten toimijoiden identiteettityö mahdollistaa globalisaation, ideoiden ylikansallisen leviämisen ja paikallisten politiikkojen harmonisaation. Tutkimuksessa käsitellään glokalisaation teemaa tähdentäen sitä, miten globaali ja lokaali kietoutuvat toisiinsa. Tutkimuksessa etsitään vastauksia kolmeen kysymykseen: 1) miksi globaali politiikan kieli tulee kotoutetuksi, omaksutuksi ja kehitetyksi paikallisella tasolla, ja mikä on identiteettityön rooli tässä prosessissa, 2) mikä on identiteettityön rooli kansallisten toimijoiden eurooppalaisessa tiedepoliittisessa yhteistyössä ja etenkin sen toteuttamisessa, ja 3) kuinka identiteettityö muokkaa globaaleja politiikan virtauksia ja johtaa siihen, etteivät päätökset johda aina vastaaviin toimenpiteisiin (ns. irtikytkeminen, "decoupling"). Näiden kysymysten empiirinen tutkimus alkaa tietotalousdiskurssin ja tietoyhteiskuntakäsitteen paikallisen käytön analyysilla. Analyysin avulla havainnollistetaan, miten näitä globaaleja ja eurooppalaista tiedepolitiikkaa 1990-luvun puolivälistä hallinneita ajatusmalleja käytetään rakentamaan oikeanlaista yhteiskunnallista toimijuutta Suomessa. Toiseksi tutkimuksessa tuotetaan analyyttinen luokittelu identiteettikategorioista, joita tutkimusrahoittajien edustajat käyttävät työskennellessään ERA-NET:eissa (ERA-NET on EU:n ERA-politiikkaan liittyvä tutkimusrahoittajien yhteistyö- ja rahoitusmuoto). Samalla tutkimuksessa analysoidaan kyseisiin identiteettiluokkiin liittyvät intressit ja esitetään, keitä nämä toimijat edustavat ja mitkä ovat heidän motivaationsa ottaa osaa eurooppalaiseen tiedepoliittiseen yhteistyöhön. Näiden kahden empiirisen analyysin avulla vastataan lopulta kysymykseen, miten on mahdollista, että ERA-NET-yhteistyö jatkuu, vaikka se ei ole saavuttanut eurooppalaisia tavoitteitaan. Kolmanneksi työssä käsitellään empiirisesti sitä, miten identiteettityö näkyy tutkimusrahoituksen ammattilaisten kuvauksissa omasta työstään ja miten se vaikuttaa yhteiseurooppalaisten tutkimusrahoituskäytäntöjen muotoutumiseen ERA-NET:eissa. Tutkimuksessa käytetyt laadulliset tutkimusmenetelmät pohjautuvat erityisesti diskursiiviseen institutionalismiin ja sosiaaliseen identiteettiteoriaan. Diskursiivisen institutionalismin näkökulmasta tutkitaan kansallisten toimijoiden motiiveja käyttää maailmanlaajuisesti leviäviä ideoita, diskursseja ja muoti-ilmauksia. Lisäksi tarkastellaan, miten kansalliset toimijat hyötyvät heitä rakentavien, heidän toimintansa mahdollistavien ja sitä ohjaavien sosiaalisten ja institutionaalisten käsikirjoitusten käyttämisestä. Työssä tutkitaan sekä diskurssien sisältöä että niihin liittyvää interaktiivista toimintaa. Näin ollen tuodaan esiin institutionaalisen toiminnan kaksi eri puolta: tavat, joilla toimijat uudelleentuottavat ja ylläpitävät instituutioita hyödyntäen "taka-alan käsitteellisiä kykyjään" sekä tavat, joilla he kykenevät muuttamaan näitä instituutioita käyttämällä "etualan institutionaalisia kykyjään". Samalla avataan mahdollisuus tutkia globalisaation toimijatasoa, etenkin paikallisen ja maailmanlaajuisen vuorovaikutuksen prosessia, joka muokkaa globalisaatiota sen edetessä. Sosiaalisen identiteettiteorian pohjalta keskitytään puolestaan toimijoiden sosiaalisiin identiteettikategorioihin: keitä toimijat ovat ja mikä on heille järkeenkäypää eri tilanteissa. Kategoriat informoivat toimijoita käytettävissä olevista diskursseista ja siitä, miten ne rajaavat heidän toimintamahdollisuuksiaan. Lisäksi kategoriat tuovat mukanaan käsityksen jaetusta minuudesta, minkä vuoksi niihin viitataan muodossa "me" sen sijaan, että puhuttaisiin "minästä". Identiteettien muodostamista tutkimusrahoittajien edustajien työssä tutkitaan lingvistisen analyysin keinoin, etenkin kiinnittämällä huomiota siihen, miten he käyttävät puheessaan persoonapronomineja. Luokat "me" ja "he" tuovat esiin, miten he rakentavat itsensä ja identiteettinsä suhteessa ympäröivään sosiaaliseen rakenteeseen: mitä identiteetit ovat, mitä eurooppalaiseen tutkimusrahoitusyhteistyöhön liittyviä intressejä niihin sisältyy ja missä kontekstissa identiteettejä käytetään ja vaihdetaan. Lisäksi työssä tutkitaan retorisen, narratiivisen ja diskurssianalyysin keinoin, mitä toimijat tekevät käyttäessään ja rakentaessaan tiettyjä identiteettejä tietyissä konteksteissa. Menetelmiä käytetään siis analysoitaessa ERA-NET-toimijoiden puhetta, mutta erityisen keskeisessä asemassa ne ovat analysoitaessa politiikkadokumentteja. Esimerkiksi julkishallinnossa käytetyn tietotalousdiskurssin paikantamiseksi käytetään hyväksi sen erityispiirteitä kuten siihen sisältyviä käsitteitä. Kun diskurssi on paikannettu, käytetään narratiivisen ja retorisen analyysin keinoja sen tutkimiseksi, miten ja mitä varten diskurssia käytetään. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu politiikkadokumenteista ja haastatteluista. Dokumenttiaineisto koostuu kolmesta osiosta: 1) tietotaloutta sekä tieto- ja informaatioyhteiskuntaa käsittelevistä Euroopan unionin, OECD:n, G8:n ja Suomen valtionhallinnon julkisista asiakirjoista ajanjaksolla 1995–2005, 2) suomalaisten ministeriöiden vuosien 2006 ja 2010 tulevaisuuskatsauksista, joissa ministeriöt esittävät toimialansa keskeisimmät lyhyen ja keskipitkän aikavälin haasteet ja toimintavaihtoehdot, ja 3) kolmen ERA-NET:in sisäisestä dokumentoinnista koskien niiden yhteiseurooppalaisia rahoitushakuja 2000-luvun jälkimmäisellä puoliskolla. Toinen aineiston osa koostuu eri maiden ja eri ERA-NET:tien edustajien haastatteluista. Haastateltavat henkilöt edustavat tutkimusohjelmien omistajia – tyypillisesti ministeriöitä tai alueellisia viranomaisia, jotka avaavat tutkimusohjelmia – sekä tutkimusohjelmien hallinnoijia kuten tutkimusneuvostoja ja muita tutkimusta rahoittavia virastoja. Tutkimukseen haastateltiin vuosina 2009– 2012 kahtakymmentä ERA-NET-edustajaa kahdeksasta maasta, yhdestätoista organisaatiosta ja kymmenestä ERA-NET:istä. Haastattelut rakentuivat temaattisesti ERA-NET:tejä, niissä työskentelyä sekä eurooppalaista ja kansainvälistä tutkimusrahoitusjärjestelmää koskevien kysymysten ympärille. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että paikalliset toimijat käyttävät ja muokkaavat maailmanlaajuista, globaalia politiikan kieltä, koska se tarjoaa hyödyllisiä välineitä toimijan omaan identiteettityöhön. Esimerkiksi käsite "tietoyhteiskunta", joka on osa tietotalousdiskurssia, tarjoaa suomalaisille ministeriöille sosiaalisesti vakuuttavan mutta joustavan työkalun, jolla ne kykenevät uudistamaan omaa poliittista ja yhteiskunnallista asemaansa Suomessa. Käsitteen ylikansallinen tunnettuus tuo sille sosiaalista vakuuttavuutta, jolloin siitä muodostuu resurssi, jota ministeriöt pystyvät käyttämään hyväkseen rakentaessaan ja kommunikoidessaan omaa kansallista ja yhteiskunnallista tärkeyttään. Lisäksi tutkimus osoittaa, että tutkimusrahoitusorganisaatiot käyttävät eurooppalaista tiedepoliittista yhteistyötä välineenä oman identiteettinsä rakennusprosessissa. Tutkimuksen mukaan identiteettityö selittää myös osaltaan, miksi ERA-NET-yhteistyö voi jatkua, vaikka se ei ole saavuttanut tiettyjä materiaalisia päätavoitteitaan. Nykytoimijoiden tulee kyetä esittämään itsensä rationaalisina, kehittyneinä ja kansainvälisinä pelaajina ja ERA-NET:it ovat hyödyllisiä keinoja tämän tavoitteen toteuttamisessa. Osallistuminen trendikkäimpiin, vakuuttavimpiin ja poliittisesti tuettuihin kansainvälisen yhteistyön muotoihin on merkki siitä, että toimija on kansainvälinen ja rationaalinen. Osallistuminen on näin ollen itsessään sosiaalisesti palkitsevaa. Tutkimuksessa osoitetaan, että toimijoiden jatkuva identiteettityö muokkaa politiikkatoimenpiteiden leviämistä niin, että se tuottaa paikallista harmonisaatiota täydellisen yhdenmukaistumisen sijaan. Identiteettityö siis muokkaa prosessia, jolla maailmanlaajuiset ideat saavat paikallisen muotonsa ja ohjaa muutosta kohti glokalisaatiota. Identiteettityö ja useiden identiteettikategorioiden samanaikainen käyttäminen mahdollistaa, että toimijat käyttävät yhtäaikaisesti useita institutionaalisia resurssilähteitä rakentaen niistä luovasti uudenlaisia ymmärryksiä. Esimerkiksi edustajien mahdollisuus vaihtaa maailmanlaajuisesta identiteetistä paikalliseen ja takaisin mahdollistaa sen, että he tulkitsevat globaaleja ideoita paikallisesta näkökulmasta ja venyttävät niihin sisältyviä periaatteita niin, että ne sopivat yhteen paikallisten realiteettien kanssa. Näin ollen he luovat globaaleista malleista glokaaleja todellisuuksia. Nämä todellisuudet sisältävät sekä globaaleja että paikallisia elementtejä, minkä vuoksi identiteettityö johtaa melko samanaikaiseen globaalien ideoiden leviämisprosessiin kuitenkin niin, että paikalliset lopputulokset eroavat jonkin verran toisistaan. Identiteettityö myös mahdollistaa tavoitteiden ja toimenpiteiden irtikytkemisen. Sen ansiosta toimijoilla on mahdollisuus noudattaa useita institutionaalisia sääntöjä samaan aikaan. Tämä institutionaalisten identiteettien repertuaari ja niiden luova käyttö saattaa johtaa yhtäältä hankaluuksiin, mutta toisaalta myös mahdollistaa pakenemisen vaikeista tilanteista sosiaalisesti hyväksytyillä tavoilla. Kun tietyt institutionaaliset vaatimukset käyvät liian hankaliksi toteuttaa, edustajat pystyvät ottamaan käyttöön toisen identiteettikategorian ja hyödyntämään siihen sisältyviä sääntöjä sosiaalisesti hyväksyttynä keinona tilanteen kiertämiseksi. Tämä tulos avaa uuden, aktiivista intressipohjaista toimijuutta korostavan näkökulman tilanteisiin, joissa päätökset ja toimenpiteet eivät vastaa toisiaan. Tästä näkökulmasta käsin toiminnan irtikytkentä ei ole niinkään irtisanoutumista tietyn normin mukaisen käytännön toteuttamisesta vaan tilannekohtaista vaihtamista toisiin normeihin, jotka ovat yhtä lailla sosiaalisesti hyväksyttyjä, perusteltuja ja tärkeitä. Yhdessä tutkimuksen tulokset havainnollistavat, miten kansallinen ja eurooppalainen poliittinen toiminta saavat läheisesti vaikutteita maailmanlaajuisesti leviävistä ja ajallisesti muuttuvista ideoista ja käsikirjoituksista. Koska näin on, poliittisten päättäjien ja toimijoiden toimia ja perusteita ei voida täysin ymmärtää ottamatta tätä kulttuurisesti rakentunutta ulottuvuutta huomioon. Kansainvälisen poliittisen toiminnan tutkimuksen täytyykin kiinnittää entistä tarkemmin huomiota omiin analyyttisiin kansallista ja globaalia käsitteleviin kategorioihinsa. Jos tutkija itsestään selvästi olettaa, että valtiot ovat tärkeimpiä kansallisen ja kansainvälisen säätelyn ja hallinnan toimijoita, hän saattaa jättää huomaamatta laajemmat rakenteet, jotka rakentavat kyseiset kansallisvaltiot ja kansalliset mieltymykset, ohjaten siten kansallista hallintaa. Toisaalta tutkija, joka keskittyy pelkästään ylikansallisiin rakenteisiin, saattaa tulla siihen hätiköityyn johtopäätökseen, että kansallisvaltio olisi katoamassa tai että se ei ole kansainvälisen yhteistyön tai hallinnan merkittävä toimija. Tässä väitöskirjatyössä kehitetty väite sijoittuu näiden kahden ääripään väliin. Sen metodologinen kanta on, että on mahdollista – ja itse asiassa analyyttisesti kaikkein hedelmällisintä – ymmärtää kansallisvaltiot poliittisesti erillisinä, mutta samalla maailmanlaajuisina rakenteina. Tutkimuksen väite on, että globalisaatio ei vain tapahdu – ihmiset institutionaalisina toimijoina tuottavat sen. Kansainvälisesti toimivina, ylikansallisesti rakentuneina organisaatioiden ja professioiden edustajina nämä aktiiviset toimijat ovat saaneet osakseen tehtäviä ja vastuita, joissa heillä on mahdollisuus luoda, omaksua, ottaa käyttöön, muokata ja levittää maailmankulttuurisia käsikirjoituksia. Nimenomaan tämä globaalin ja lokaalin välimaastoon sijoittuva toiminta tuottaa kansallisten politiikkojen synkronisaatiota, ja sitä myöten sitä, mikä ymmärretään globalisaatioksi. Muutos ei välttämättä ole sataprosenttisen yhdenmukainen, mutta ajallisesti yhteneväinen ja huomattava. Tämä muutos tulee ja menee aaltomaisina trendeinä – yksi pyyhkäisee läpi maailman heiketäkseen hiljalleen, minkä jälkeen tulee toinen kulkeakseen ylikansallisen matkansa ja niin edelleen. Synkronisesti jatkuvasti liikkeessä olevat ja muuttuvat valtioiden politiikat muodostavat yhdessä merkille pantavan yksikön, joka muodostuu yhteydessä olevista mutta silti erillisistä toimijoista. ; The European Union and its member states have articulated a close link between the development of Euro¬pean science policy and national economic growth. It is indeed in the manifest interest of European nation-states to implement science-policy models and practices that help their domestic economies grow and prosper. In this connection, it is interesting, however, that separate nation states, regardless of the evident economic differences between them, have ended up adopting similar science-policy practices, ideas, and policies. In addition, this is true beyond intra European Union level. Strong science and knowledge lie at the heart of several key strategies of the union and are thought of as contributing specifically to Europe's economic prosperity and competitiveness. Yet the European Union seems to fall in line with discourses and models that are globally shared and have already been implemented elsewhere, despite Europe's substantial differences from other continents and political alliances. Existing European science-policy literature, based on rationally oriented explanatory models, is not able to explain this phenomenon fully. Firstly, the concordant and concomitant policy discourses used and choices made throughout Europe cannot be explained by functional arguments. Differently structured economies and those of different sizes are likely to differ in the challenges they face, and if policy choices were based on their respective needs, the similarities currently discernible among nation-states in their decisions, preferences, and actions would be unlikely. Secondly, rational arguments based on an assumption that calculative action stems from national interests have an uphill battle vis-à-vis the reality. If they were valid, careful decisions made by national actors would be followed by consequent actions. In reality, contrastingly, one of the ultimate goals for cooperative European research-policy activities, Europe-wide integration of research funding, which has been strongly endorsed by the European heads of state since 2000, has not materialized: national actors in charge of research funding have not reached the goals their own chief public representatives have set. Hence, one may question whether the decision was carefully planned beforehand and attention then redirected to execution. Furthermore, the aforementioned rationalist argument would predict that experience from earlier actions would steer later decisions. While the failure of European integration of research funding is abundantly apparent, meaning that, for instance, financial gains through common research funding have not been achieved, nation-states' enthusiasm to participate in European research-policy activities has not declined accordingly. This finding indicates that rational calculation cannot explain why national actors are keen to take part in common research-funding initiatives. It points instead to there being other motivations for the national agents' participation in European research-funding activities than executing carefully calculated decisions and pursuing nationally relevant financial and material goals. Also, because nation-states' participation in this policy field is based on voluntary activity, and coercive power imposed from the direction of the European Union towards its member states hence cannot explain the uniformity of national behavior with respect to science policy either, there is an obvious need for a new, more pertinent explanation to the puzzle of why the Member States apply a uniform science-policy discourse and national actors are so keen on taking part in European research-funding activities despite some of the main political, European objectives not being reached. The dissertation presents a sociologically and culturally oriented viewpoint for explaining the aforementioned mysteries. Nation-states, national policy actors, and national research-policy agents are understood as culturally scripted actors embedded in social structures surrounding and constructing them. This cultural understanding, some of which is globally shared and creates a world culture, both constrains and enables these actors, and it supplies them with more and less profound institutional rules, scripts, and principles, which they need to follow in order to gain and maintain their socially admitted positions. The existence of this kind of behavior pattern – highlighted by world society scholars and based on the school of sociological institutionalism – is able to explain why common policy models, ideas, and discourses spread and yield conformity across the field of nation-states when rationalistic explanations fail. The dissertation goes further, introducing a contribution to world society theory by specifying in more detail how local policy actors position themselves and motivate their endeavors for themselves as well as others. For such a purpose, in-depth analysis is devoted to how national actors bearing agency on behalf of a nation-state identify themselves and how such identifications and identity work demystify what may seem conformism but is, in fact, best explained as pursuit of interests as long as these agents' identity categories are taken into account. What may from a bird's-eye view seem to be mindless conformism is really articulation of different interests, attached to multiple identity categories. Therefore, the work examines how identity work makes globalization, trans¬national spreading of ideas, and the synchronization of local policy choices possible. In the course of this analysis, it addresses the theme of glocalization, signifying that the global and the local are intertwined. Answers are sought for three questions: Why does global policy language become domesticated, adopted, and cultivated on local level, and what is the role of identity work in the process; what is the role of identity work in facilitating European science-policy cooperation among national agents; and how does identity work shape the form of global policy diffusion and enable decoupling? To investigate these questions empirically, firstly the local use of the knowledge-based economy discourse and the term "information society" are analyzed. Consequently, attention is turned to how these global key ideas framing European science policy since the mid-1990s are utilized in the process of creating "proper" national actorhood in Finland. Secondly an analytical classification of the identity categories used by research-funding professionals working in ERA-NETs (ERA-related research-funding instruments) is constructed, and the indicated interests attached to each identity category are analyzed for purposes of disentangling who the agents represent and what their motivations are for participating in European research-policy cooperation. Then, informed by these two steps, an empirical answer is formulated as to how it is possible that the ERA-NET cooperation continues even though it does not lead to meeting of its pan-European objectives. Thirdly, the work empirically examines how identity work is manifested in research-funding professionals' description of their work and how it affects the process of formation of actual co-European research-funding practices in ERA-NETs. The dissertation concentrates on local agentic actors' motivations, rationales, and social realities, alongside linguistic and behavioral strategies that contribute to policy harmonization and lead to worldwide spreading of ideas and concepts. For these purposes, qualitative analysis methods have been used, with discursive institutionalism and social identity theory drawn on especially. From the standpoint of discursive institutionalism, national agents' motives for using globally spreading ideas, discourses, and catchwords are studied, as are ways in which they benefit from these and from the underlying social and institutional scripts that construct, enable, and steer towards such behavior. In the process, both the substantive content of the discourses and the interactive process involved are studied, for bringing out two sides of institutional behavior: the ways in which agents re-create and maintain institutions by means of their "background ideational abilities" and ways in which they are able to change those institutions by using the "foreground institutional abilities." At the same time, the actor level of globalization is opened for analysis, especially the process of local–global interaction that shapes the globalization process as it proceeds. Concurrently, agents' social identity categories – who they are and what makes sense to them in various situations – are examined. These categories inform the agents about the discourses they take part in, which restrict their choices as they are used. Furthermore, these identifications reflect shared conceptions of a collective self and therefore make such identities about "we" more than "I." This identity-building in research funders' work is examined mainly via methodological tools provided by linguistic analysis, especially in relation to the ways they use personal pronouns in their speech. The categories "we" and "they" shed light on how these agents construct themselves and their identities within a social structure they experience around them, what those identities are exactly, what interests are attached to them in regard to the European research-funding cooperation, and in which context these identities are used and switched. In addition, employing multiple measurement techniques, from rhetorical, narrative, and discourse analysis, illuminates what is done through actions such as using, or constructing, a particular identity in a certain context. These techniques are presented throughout the dissertation in the analysis of ERA-NET agents' talk, but their particular importance is highlighted in the context of policy documents. For example, to situate a particular discourse, such as that of the knowledge-based economy, some of its distinctive characteristics (especially concepts it encompasses) are used, to locate its use. After the discourse is identified and located in text, narrative and rhetorical analysis are applied, allowing one to say more about how and for what purposes it is used. The dataset for the research consists of policy documents and interviews. The document form data consist of the European Union, OECD, G8, and Finnish public policy documents from 1995–2005 dealing with the knowledge-based economy and the knowledge and information society; the Finnish government ministries' "future reviews" from 2006 and 2010 (in which they describe the most central short- and mid-term challenges and action alternatives in their respective policy fields); and internal documentation of three distinct ERA-NETs that were active in the latter half of the previous decade, pertaining to their research-funding calls and how they were conducted. The other part of the dataset consists of interviews with ERA-NET agents in several countries and ERA-NETs. The participants interviewed were individuals representing research program owners – typically ministries or regional authorities defining research programs – or program managers such as research councils or other research-funding agencies managing research programs. In total, 20 ERA-NET agents, from eight nation-states, 11 distinct organizations, and 10 individual ERA-NETs, were interviewed, in 2009–2012. The interviews were constructed around thematic questions all having to do with the ERA-NET, European, international funding system and working in ERA-NETs. The results of the research show that global policy language is embodied in adoption and adaptation at local level because it serves as a useful instrument in the actors' identity work. For instance, the "information society" concept, which is part of the knowledge-based economy discourse, provides Finnish ministries with a socially convincing yet flexible affordance to reaffirmation of their social and political importance in Finland. Its roots as a renowned international catchphrase lend the concept social assertiveness, rendering it a resource that ministries can fruitfully employ in making their claims about how important they are in the national state. Furthermore, the research illustrates that European science-policy cooperation is used as a vehicle for positive identity construction by national research-funding organizations. It brings forth how the studied ERA-NET cooperation can continue even if it has not reached some of its main, material, goals because in the current era actors have a need to be portrayed as rational, advanced, international players. The ERA-NETs act as a useful tool for reaching this goal. Participation in the trendiest, most convincing and politically supported forms of international cooperation is in itself a sign that an actor is acting internationally and rationally; hence, participation is socially rewarding. The ongoing identity work also shapes the form of policy diffusion in ways that lead to harmonization yet not isomorphism. It affects the process through which global ideas gain form on the local level and steers it in the direction of glocalization. Identity work manifests itself in situations in which agents define themselves, and their sending organizations, as being certain kinds of actors or belonging to a certain "we" group. It also entails situations in which agents switch among these identity categories continuously in order to take new subject positions and communicate associated interests or institutional restrictions. This identity work and simultaneous use of several identity categories enables agents to draw on different institutional sources creatively and to construct new kinds of understandings. For example, agents' opportunity to switch back and forth between global and local identity categories enables them to interpret global ideas from local viewpoints, stretch the boundaries of global principles to fit local features, and hence construct glocalized realities. These realities include both global and local elements for which identity work leads to relatively simultaneous diffusion of global ideas, yet the outcomes are locally distinctive. At the same time, identity work enables decoupling by offering agents opportunities to follow various institutional rules at the same time. This institutional identity repertoire may lead to difficult situations but also enables agents to construct socially acceptable approaches for escaping awkward situations strategically. When certain institutional requirements turn out to be situationally too difficult to meet, agents are able to activate other identity categories and use attached scripts as a socially acceptable way to escape the situation. This finding opens a new window for understanding the process of decoupling from the standpoint of agentic actorhood. From this perspective, decoupling is not so much an act of discontinuity with the stated norm as a timely conversion to other norms, just as socially acceptable and hence important, that can be used to justify the turn in action. Together these results indicate that policymaking, both European and national, is largely informed by globally circulating and timely changing ideas and scripts. Therefore, policy actors' and policy-makers' actions or motivations cannot be fully understood without consideration of this culturally constructed reality. In addition, it shows that research on international policymaking must take a closer look at its own analytical categories of national and global. If one readily assumes that states are the central pillars of regulation and governance within and across national borders, and such an assumption steers the research design, it creates a real risk of the research failing to recognize larger structures that construct nation-states and national preferences and that thereby steer states' governance. A researcher who, on the other hand, concentrates exclusively on transnational structures may come to the ill-judged conclusion that the nation-state has come to an end or is not in any way a relevant actor in international cooperation or governance. The argument developed for the dissertation is positioned between these two extremes. Its methodological stance is that it is possible and, in fact, analytically most fruitful to understand a nation-state as a politically separate entity but at the same time a global construction. The research also highlights that globalization does not just happen; it is institutional agents, people, that produce globalization. As internationally operating and transnationally constructed representatives of organizations and professions, these agents have gained functions and responsibilities for which they are allowed to create, adopt, enact, shape, and globally spread world cultural scripts. It is particularly this activity, positioned between the global and local, that is leading to synchronization of national policies and, in this, what is often considered to be globalization. The change may not be a hundred percent isomorphic, but it is temporarily consistent and noticeable. It comes and goes in wavelike trends. One trend sweeps across the world only to weaken gradually, after which ebbing another is born, which in its turn flows over the globe, and so on. Synchronically constantly moving and turning, nation-states constitute a recognizable unit that consists clearly of interdependent, not independent, actors.
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If we could have only gotten "yes, affirmative action," or "no, affirmative action," as the outcomes in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided last week, you should have pulled for the decision the Court delivered: public colleges, or privates that receive federal funding, cannot use race as a factor in admissions. Other things equal, we want people treated as individuals, not as members of a race, as director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies, Anastasia Boden, wrote soon after the decision was announced. But Students for Fair Admissions did not present a simple choice, at least as policy goes, nor are all things equal. The decision combined two cases: One against the University of North Carolina – a state school – the other against private Harvard University. Those schools, by virtue of one being a government institution and the other not, should not be treated the same. It is much more consistent with a free society, as well as diverse views about what constitutes a fair admissions policy, to allow private institutions to make their own decisions than to have government, especially Washington, impose uniform rules on all. Of course, higher education involves a great deal of federal money, especially in the form of grant and loan aid to students, as well as research. That gives the federal government a large financial presence in the ivory tower. But even with that, the default should be autonomy for private institutions – there is more freedom with funding and no strings than with strings attached. Affirmative action is, crucially, different from past racial discrimination, in which people of specific races, especially African Americans, were intentionally kept out of institutions because of their race, as opposed to schools seeking to be more inclusive of all racial groups. Indeed, as the dissent in Students for Fair Admissions emphasized, affirmative action is, at least in part, intended to more fully incorporate African Americans into higher education specifically because they suffered centuries of rank, race‐based discrimination and oppression. One can disagree with that reparative reasoning, yet still see how decent people can support it. The other major argument for allowing colleges to take race into account in admissions is that there is educational and social value to a racially diverse student body. This might not be empirically proven – little involving human beings is – but it is easy to conceive how a student's education would be enriched by learning and living with students of diverse backgrounds. And research suggests that when people from different groups come together, it helps to build bridges among them. There are, simply, reasonable grounds for assembling racially diverse student bodies. But if so, why only allow leeway for private institutions? Why not public, too? Because public colleges and universities are government institutions, receiving funding directly from state taxpayers and answerable to the state. And government actions are ultimately done at the point of a gun – a legal monopoly on force that can result in jailing or worse for those who do not comply. Hence, government was the primary enforcer of past racial injustice, from slavery, to Jim Crow, to discriminatory allocation of housing assistance. That power makes it inherently more dangerous to let government consider race in allocation of resources than private institutions. As former Center for Constitutional Studies Director Ilya Shapiro wrote in Cato's amicus brief asking the Court to join Students for Fair Admissions' suit against Harvard with its suit against UNC: Racial preferences by private universities certainly have negative effects on individuals too. But it is one thing to be viewed through a racial lens by a private institution or fellow citizen, quite another—and substantially more harmful—for a polity to reduce people to racial identifiers. Government racial classifications demean all citizens. Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 353 (2003) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
The majority in Students for Fair Admissions acknowledged that there might be reasonable grounds for universities to consider race in constructing classes. A footnote saying that military academies were not part of the decision mentions that a federal government brief argued that at such institutions "race‐based admission programs further compelling interests." The footnote says that the majority "does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present," seemingly conceding that some schools might need to balance students' races. Justice Sotomayor picked up on this in her dissent, noting that many schools have military training programs, and other institutions also have "distinct interests": To the extent the Court suggests national security interests are "distinct," those interests cannot explain the Court's narrow exemption, as national security interests are also implicated at civilian universities. See infra, at 64–65. The Court also attempts to justify its carveout based on the fact that "[n]o military academy is a party to these cases." Ante, at 22, n. 4. Yet the same can be said of many other institutions that are not parties here, including the religious universities supporting respondents, which the Court does not similarly exempt from its sweeping opinion. See Brief for Georgetown University et al. as Amici Curiae 18–29 (Georgetown Brief ) (Catholic colleges and universities noting that they rely on the use of race in their holistic admissions to further not just their academic goals, but also their religious missions); see also Harvard II, 980 F. 3d, at 187, n. 24 ("[S]chools that consider race are diverse on numerous dimensions, including in terms of religious affiliation, location, size, and courses of study offered").
Recognizing that race can matter, the majority identified an avenue by which schools can consider it: if an applicant writes an admissions essay that mentions how their race has impacted them. "[N]othing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise," says the decision. Neither federal student aid nor research funding require the federal government to take a position on the "right" admissions policy. Student aid is directed to institutions based on millions of recipients making choices about the colleges they wish to attend. They can freely decide, using their own, diverse weightings of competing values, including academic performance and racial inclusivity, which institutions have acceptable policies, and which do not. Research funding, meanwhile, should be aimed at a particular end – gaining new knowledge in a specific area – not supporting an institution. Absent compelling evidence that their policies are intended to exclude specific racial groups, as opposed to maximize inclusivity, private institutions accepting federal funds should be able to set their own admissions policies. This might require amending Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which is the Court's basis for applying its affirmative action prohibition to private colleges. There are, alas, no easy answers to questions of race because of the centuries‐long, stark clash between our ideals of colorblind equality and what our government and society have actually done. When we have such wicked problems, it is best to let diverse people make decisions for themselves, weighing their own valuations of goods including colorblindness, racial diversity, repairing historical wrongs, and more. It is best to embrace what should always be our default: liberty.
APPROVED ; This thesis, empirically analyses the role of cultural aspects in accounting and finance disciplines from diverse perspectives. It is made up of three distinct research papers. The first paper (chapter 4) primarily investigates the impact of sociocultural factors in underpinning early accounting thought in an ancient civilization (Ceylon-presently known as Sri Lanka). The next two papers maintain cultural aspects in the limelight but shift the focus to the modern corporate world. Precisely, the second paper (chapter 5) examines the role of Chief Executive Officer's (CEO) cultural values in the firm leverage decision. The third paper (chapter 6) extends the work of chapter 5 and proposes that a firm does not associate with only a single culture, which has been the conventional research focus, but that firms operate with a multiplicity of cultures. Therefore chapter 6 empirically analyses the impact of cultural differences among the CEO, board of directors and stakeholders in a firm, on determining its idiosyncratic risk. Therefore, this thesis emphasizes the impact of culture on various accounting and finance aspects from a context ranging from antiquity to modern times. Another notable feature is that chapters 5 and 6 of this thesis, transcend the previous common focus of firm nationality based on country of origin and study cultural influences on corporate decision-making at a granular level, i.e. by examining the cultural values of the key players in a firm (e.g. the CEO, board of directors, stakeholders). Overall, it contributes to the existing literature on the impact of culture in Accounting and Finance outcomes. Chapter 4 goes back in time to the 1st-2nd centuries A.D. in ancient Ceylon (presently Sri Lanka) and employs content analysis method to study the English translations of 122 lithic and other inscriptions during the period from 1st century A.D. to the 16th century A.D. The study refers to an array of accounting and non-accounting practices in the ancient days and finds the existence of well-articulated forms of 'kingship accounting' and 'Buddhist temple accounting' practices that were engraved in rock walls or formations in ancient Ceylon. Furthermore this paper sheds light on the existence of cultural, socio-economic, political and technological infrastructure that underpinned the early accounting system, with special reference to the sociocultural landscape in ancient Ceylon that was largely governed by Buddhist philosophies. The study reveals that sociocultural factors exerted a dual impact, i.e. direct and indirect, on early accounting thought. The sociocultural factors that compelled accounting practices to be undertaken in ancient Buddhist monasteries signifies the direct impact, whilst the indirect impact encompasses the role of Buddhist cultural values in shaping the ancient political, technological (literacy, numerical technology and coinage) and economic landscape, which in turn underpinned early accounting thought. This study is unique as it brings to the fore, the influence of socio-cultural factors that prevailed during the ancient era, in ensuring the continuation of early accounting practices. Following a thorough literature review in a Ceylonese context, the researcher believes that this is among the first attempts to do so. Chapter 5 (and subsequently chapter 6) focuses on cultural implications in a modern corporate setting. Chapter 5, in particular, focuses on the influence of CEO's cultural values on the firm leverage decision. It is well-known that debt can mitigate agency problems between managers and stockholders, by minimizing free cash-flows. However, the implicit factors that might motivate a manager to voluntarily choose debt discipline is barely researched. Chapter 5, therefore, focuses on managerial traits conditioned by national culture and their impact on firm leverage decision. This study is novel as it transcends the previous conventional emphasis on a firms' nationality on the leverage decision by focusing on the CEO's cultural origin and proposes that national cultural values of CEOs distort their perception of costs and benefits of debt. In addition to testing the association between CEO culture and firm leverage, the model is extended to closely examine the same, given three scenarios, i.e. when the existing firm leverage is low, moderate and high. By scrutinizing a sample of 594 CEOs, originating from 14 different nationalities, serving 317 Fortune 500 firms in the U.S., during 2000 to 2015 and by employing quantile panel regression with instrumental variables, the study reveals that high mastery CEOs, unknowingly, are in the pursuit of a target capital structure whilst highly embedded CEOs choose to borrow, irrespective of the current firm leverage. Apparently, high mastery CEOs make capital structure decisions that are more in the interest of shareholders, while the capital structure decisions of highly embedded CEOs might be detrimental to the firm. A direct link between cultural values and leverage, has been detected and confirmed via an analysis of a major exogenous intervention (global financial crisis 2007/08) to the system. By using a sample of non-US CEOs, the study reveals that cultural values are portable. Results remain robust to alternative specifications and procedures to mitigate endogeneity concerns. Academically the findings of this paper open up new paradigms that need to be considered in the area of agency conflicts and monitoring costs. Chapter 6 extends the previous work in Chapter 5 and proposes that a firm does not associate with just a single culture but operates with a multiplicity of cultures. Owing to the recent public pressure to increase diversity on boards, firms increasingly employ foreign nationals as board of directors and/or CEOs. As the employees, investors and other stakeholders are mostly local, how would they interact with a foreign CEO and/or board of directors? More importantly how would this interaction among a multiplicity of cultures affect the firm idiosyncratic risk? Whilst the cultural impact on firm outcomes has remained in the spotlight for the last decade or so, the interaction of a multiplicity of cultures within a firm and its impact on corporate outcomes is rarely studied. The study initially employs Feasible Generalized Least Squares Method (FGLS) and then the Dynamic Panel System Generalized Method of Momentum (DPS-GMM) to analyse a sample of 1,190 firms from 12 European countries, over 14 years from 2005 to 2018. The findings reveal that the cultural distance between the CEO and stakeholders, on firm risk, appear to remain positive and strongly significant, regardless of endogeneity correction and various other robustness tests, inferring that the greater cultural distances and the resulting disarray of preferences of CEOs and stakeholder groups may result with CEOs making unpredictable decisions, ultimately increasing performance volatility. CEO' board cultural distance evinces a negative association, which proves statistically significant in most of the endogeneity corrected regression models, implying that a greater distance between the CEO and the board of directors is beneficial to a company as the board will play a more independent and active role in preventing the management from participating in value destroying risky ventures and making strategic decisions single-handedly. Within-board cultural distances generate mixed results. Moreover, to allow for the asymmetries between cultural distances and firm risk, quantile panel regression is employed. Whilst the first two cultural spheres reinforce the previous findings, within-board cultural distances appear to reduce stock performance volatility, in firms with moderate idiosyncratic risks, where the same is amplified in least volatile and most volatile firms, implying that the extra social and human capital that would be brought in to the firm by culturally diverse directors, would help to position the firm better in terms of managing risks, only in moderately uncertain environments. The results of this study remain robust to alternative specifications and endogeneity concerns. To the best of my knowledge, this paper is among the first, to investigate the co-existence of a multiplicity of cultures within a firm and its impact on firm performance volatility. Overall, the objective of this doctoral thesis is to improve the existing knowledge on the subtle and understated influences of cultural differences and resulting human behaviour on business outcomes.
Climate change constitutes one of the most pressing challenges faced by tourism today. Tourism research on climate-induced environmental changes has contributed to an increase in knowledge about adaptation during the last decade. Despite a general recognition of the urgent need to adapt, as well as a large-scale scientific effort in this field underlining evidence of potential risk, the impacts of adaptation research on practices and policies in tourism appear to be relatively low. To reduce the gap between adaptation research and practitioner action this thesis aims to increase the understanding of adaptation to climate-induced changes in nature-based tourism, by analyzing the adaptation processes and practices of tourism actors involved in glacier tourism. Glacier tourism is a highly relevant example of a type of tourism which needs to adapt to climate-induced environmental changes. Therefore, this thesis examines: what is the state-of-the-field knowledge concerning relationships among tourism, the glacial environment, and climate change; how do glacier tourism actors adapt to the current and future impacts of climate change; and how can glacier tourism actors' engagement with science contribute to proactive adaptation. The research conducted in this thesis uses a combination of two analytical approaches. An actor-oriented approach is employed to investigate tourism actors' experiences and perceptions of climate change and their adaptation behavior. The other approach draws on transdisciplinary research, involving an active engagement of local stakeholders and scientists to form dialogues to combine knowledge bases, and to verify the social relevance of research on climate change adaptation. An embedded case study design was chosen due to its potential to integrate an actor-oriented approach with transdisciplinary research. The glacier sites of southeast Iceland form the case-study area wherein the adaptation processes of glacier tourism actors were examined. The case study constitutes the setting for the collection of empirical data by means of quantitative methods, such as literature review and visitor surveys, as well as qualitative methods, such as interviews and participatory scenario workshops. The results reveal a limited but growing body of scholarly work that examines the relationships between tourism, glaciers, and climate change impacts and responses. The existing work lacks however important data concerning the motives, preferences, experiences, and behaviors of actors in glacier tourism in general and specifically in the context of climate change. The results of the analysis of tourism actors' adaptation practices furthermore show that climate change has already resulted in several impacts on glacier sites and that operators have responded to these implications in the form of a wait-and-see strategy combined with ad-hoc reactive adaptation. On the other hand, the results also show that visitors to glacier sites are more heterogeneous in their responses to future climate change–induced impacts. Furthermore that adaptation processes of glacier tourism actors are shaped by the interaction of actors' attributes of agency, such as risk perception, concerns, motivations and interests, with structural elements of the glacier destination systems, such as type of visitation implication, prevailing economic rationale or lack of effective climate change institutions. Lastly, the results stress the development and application of a participatory scenario planning process, as a form of science-practitioner engagement, to be a valuable tool to support the adaptation planning of glacier sites through sharing knowledge, elaborating on long-term changes and associated uncertainties, and exploring proactive adaptation options. Climate is only one of the drivers of change that determine the development of glacier tourism. It is thus concluded that climate change implications cannot be understood as isolated factors; rather, they should be viewed as constituting interconnected and cumulative effects on socioeconomic and natural environments. Mainstreaming climate change adaptation into current destination planning and management or integrating climate change adaptation with related science fields, such hazard reduction research or sustainability science, would thus provide more promising approaches than studying climate change adaptation in isolation. ; Loftslagsbreytingar eru ein stærsta áskorun sem ferðaþjónusta heimsins stendur frammi fyrir í dag. Síðastliðinn áratug hafa rannsóknir innan ferðamálafræði á breyttum umhverfisaðstæðum vegna loftlagsbreytinga stuðlað að aukningu rannsókna á aðlögum að loftslagsbreytingum. Þrátt fyrir almenna viðurkenningu á þörfinni fyrir aðlögun að breyttum aðstæðum, og umfangsmiklar rannsóknir sem sýna fram á mögulega áhættu sem fylgir slíkum breytingum, virðast áhrif aukinnar þekkingar um aðlögun á starfsemi og stefnu í ferðaþjónustu enn vera tiltölulega lítil. Með það að leiðarljósi að minnka bilið á milli rannsókna á aðlögun að loftslagsbreytingum og aðgerða ferðaþjónustunnar, leggur þessi doktorsritgerð áherslu á að auka skilning á aðlögun að breyttum umhverfisaðstæðum vegna loftlagsbreytinga í náttúrutengdri ferðaþjónustu, með því að greina aðlögunarferli og starfshætti ferðaþjónustuaðila sem stunda jöklaferðamennsku. Jöklaferðamennska er mjög skýrt dæmi um ferðaþjónustu sem þarf að aðlaga sig að breyttu umhverfi vegna áhrifa loftslagsbreytinga. Meginmarkmið þessarar ritgerðar eru að meta: hver er staða þekkingar á sambandi ferðamennsku, jökulumhverfis og loftslagsbreytinga; hvernig ferðaþjónustuaðilar sem stunda jöklaferðamennsku aðlagist að núverandi og framtíðar áhrifum loftslagsbreytinga; og hvernig tengsl ferðaþjónustuaðila við vísindi geti stuðlað að framvirkri aðlögun. Rannsóknirnar í þessari doktorsritgerð nota sambland af tveimur greiningaraðferðum. Annars vegar gerendanálgun til að rannsaka reynslu og viðhorf ferðaþjónustuaðila til loftslagsbreytinga sem og aðlögunarhegðun þeirra. Hins vegar aðferð sem byggir á þverfaglegri nálgun sem felur í sér gagnvirka þátttöku hagaðila í héraði og sérfræðinga til að ræða saman og mynda sameiginlegan þekkingargrunn, og til að sannreyna félagslegt mikilvægi rannsókna á aðlögun að loftslagsbreytingum. Til að samþætta þessar tvær aðferðir, þ.e. gerendanálgun og þverfaglega nálgun, var ákveðið að styðjast við tilviksrannsókn. Nokkrir áfangastaðir við sunnanverðan Vatnajökul voru valdir sem rannsóknarsvæði, þar sem söfnun gagna fór fram. Stuðst var við bæði megindlega aðferðafræði, svo sem spurningakannanir til ferðamanna, og eigindlega aðferðafræði, svo sem viðtöl, þátttökuathuganir og sviðsmyndagreiningu. Niðurstöður sýna takmarkaða en vaxandi rannsóknavirkni sem beinir sjónum að tengslum ferðamennsku, jökla, áhrifum loftslagsbreytinga og viðbrögðum við slíkum áhrifum. Jafnframt, að enn vanti töluvert af rannsóknum sem beini sjónum að reynslu, hegðun og óskum gerenda í jöklaferðamennsku, bæði almennt en sérstaklega þó í tengslum við loftslagsbreytingar. Niðurstöður sýna enn fremur að loftslagsbreytingar hafa þegar haft töluverð áhrif á jöklasvæðin við sunnanverðan Vatnajökul og að ferðaþjónustuaðilar hafa brugðist við þessum afleiðingum í formi "bíða-og-sjá-til" afstöðu, ásamt samsvarandi afturvirkum aðgerðum. Á hinn bóginn sýna niðurstöðurnar einnig að ferðafólk sem heimsækir jökulsvæðin er innbyrðis breytilegt varðandi viðbrögð við framtíðar áhrifum loftslagsbreytinga. Enn fremur að aðlögunarferli gerenda í jöklaferðamennsku mótist af gagnvirku samspili gerendahæfni þeirra, varðandi þætti eins og áhættuskynjun, hugsjónir, hvata, og áhugasvið, við skipulagningu ferðaþjónustunnar og innviði á einstökum áfangastöðum, svo sem varðandi þau áhrif sem ferðamennskan hefur, viðhorf til hagþróunar og hvort til staðar séu skilvirkar stofnanir sem sinna loftlagsmálum. Síðast en ekki síst, leggja niðurstöður rannsóknanna áherslu á mikilvægi þróunar og beitingu þátttökusviðsmynda til að samtvinna viðhorf hagsmunaaðila í héraði og vísindamanna í skipulagsferli. Slíkar þátttökusviðsmyndir eru mikilvægt verkfæri til að styðja við skipulega aðlögun áfangastaða jöklaferðamennsku að breyttum umhverfisaðstæðum vegna loftlagsbreytinga, í gegnum gagnkvæma miðlun þekkingar, íhugunar um langtíma breytingar og þá óvissu sem þeim fylgir, og skoðunar á mögulegum framvirkum aðlögunaraðgerðum til að mæta slíkum breytingum Loftslagsbreytingar eru aðeins einn þeirra drifkrafta sem stýra þróun jöklaferðamennsku. Ekki er hægt að horfa á áhrif loftslagsbreytinga sem einangraða þætti; heldur verður að horfa heildrænt á alla áhrifaþætti til að skilja betur hin flóknu og gagnvirku tengsl á milli hinna samfélagslegu, hagrænu og umhverfislegu sviða. Með því að setja aðlögun að loftslagsbreytingum í forgrunn í núverandi áfangsstaðaáætlunum og stýringaraðgerðum, eða með því að samþætta aðlögun að loftslagsbreytingum við ákveðin vísindasvið eins og áhætturannsóknir eða sjálfbærnirannsóknir, væri hægt að leiða fram mun betri nálgun en með því að horfa á aðlögun að loftslagsbreytingum sem einangrað fyrirbæri. ; University of Iceland Eimskip Fund, Icelandic Tourism Research Centre, Hornafjörður Research center, the Friends of Vatnajökull, Nature Conservation Fund of Pálmi Jónsson, Kvískerjasjóður research fund and European Union Interreg Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme