Suchergebnisse

For the past three decades or so, the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has shed light on the interrelationship between modern science and technology, on one side, and contemporary society, on the other. A majority of this knowledge and insights are situated in the context of Western societies, or more precisely, in economically and technologically advanced societies in Western Europe and North America. However, STS has much to offer to the discourse of science and technology in the Global South, a territory characterized by developmental processes. Insights from different schools of thoughts in STS are arguably not only relevant but also applicable to unveil the root cause of problems that many developing societies are facing today. To make this possible, an STS-informed framework is developed to replace the Triple Helix model, which is currently a dominant perspective that prompts how science, technology, and innovation are structurally organized in the developing world. Two steps are taken in this agenda. First, limitations of the Triple Helix are exposed, and second, a new approach drawing on STS concepts is offered as an alternative model that takes into account structural, cultural, and epistemological features of technoscience.

Abstract
State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor ratios, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. Although extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor - supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe - thus engendering the post-war movement towards social - insurance is an open question.

AbstractOver the last two decades, Spain has evolved rapidly from a classic labour exporter to a labour importer. Until the 1930s Spain's migration history was predominantly marked by emigration to the Americas, and from the end of World War II until the early 1970s by emigration to some industrialized countries in Western Europe. For the first time in modern times, Spain is now the second country in the world with large‐scale immigration. Its strategic location, a relatively permissive immigration policy and economic opportunities derived from Spain's entry into the European Community have positioned this country as a major destination for immigrants. Additionally, since the mid‐1990s international migration in Spain has dramatically changed in origin composition. Despite the common perception of Africa as the most important source of immigration, some Latin American countries, in a very short time, have become some of the major sources of immigration to Spain; indeed, the term "Latin‐Americanization" has been coined to describe this process. This being so, the aim of this article is twofold. First, we examine the main reasons behind the extremely rapid increase of Latin American migration to Spain during the last decade. Then we briefly discuss some future perspectives.

En France, l'histoire des idées n'a jamais bénéficié d'une reconnaissance très claire dans l'historiographie. Ce statut indécis renvoie à la compréhension des contextes historiographiques nationaux en Europe. La France a eu, en Histoire, une tradition moins philosophique qu'ailleurs, et le succès de la « Nouvelle Histoire » a remis en cause celui la position anciennement plus assurée de l'histoire des idées. Il importe alors d'essayer de mieux comprendre la rupture entre l'histoire sociale, largement définie, telle qu'elle s'est développée en France, et l'histoire des idées. Trois niveaux d'interrogation sont ici mobilisés pour examiner le rapport avec les questions posées dans le sillage de l'école des Annales : celui des formes de pensée, celui de la tension entre le collectif et l'individuel, celui de la production et de la consommation. On peut ainsi retrouver à partir des objets (par exemple, le livre), des acteurs (par exemple, les sociabilités), les relations et la force des idées, les débats qui traversent la société, en gardant comme point de mire la formalité des pratiques. On interroge ainsi la question de la circulation et de la diversité, de la réfraction des pensées. Des exemples tirés de travaux récents montrent l'actualité de l'interrogation et le chemin parcouru.

AbstractDoes Christianity re-emerge in politics even in the most secularized part of the world, Western Europe? In this article, the exemplary case of the Netherlands provides empirical evidence for two mechanisms of resurgent Christianity in party politics. In this way, the article also offers a more precise understanding under what conditions various dimensions of religion become (again) or remain politically significant. The first mechanism has been the incentive of secularization and secularism for remaining Christians to regroup in a so-called creative minority to convey an explicitly faith-based message to a broader public. Modernization has therefore not automatically meant less religion in politics. However, creative minorities remained a relatively minor affair in Dutch party politics, despite the large number of Christian migrants and their descendants. Second, Christian and culturally rightwing, secular parties have increasingly referred to a Judeo-Christian culture to mark the political identities of the European Union and its nations in response to Islam's growing visibility. The concept of Judeo-Christian culture foremost functioned as a sacred word to denote the liberal and secular order of the West, reflecting the re-emergence of Christianity as cultural phenomenon rather than faith in West European politics.

Pour lutter contre la crise économique, l'Union européenne a placé la libéralisation du commerce international au cœur de sa stratégie « Europe 2020 ». La levée de toutes les barrières commerciales, à l'importation comme à l'exportation, qui risquent de freiner la compétitivité des entreprises européennes, est dès lors devenue l'une de ses principales préoccupations. L'Union européenne affirme vouloir concilier cette relance de son économie avec sa vocation de coopération au développement et avec l'éradication de la pauvreté dans les pays tiers. Selon elle, l'ouverture du commerce international est source de croissance et de bien-être pour tous. Or, un tel postulat ne va pas de soi pour tous les acteurs. Bien plus, il ignore les risques que comporte la libéralisation en cas d'échanges entre partenaires inégaux. Pour certains États moins avancés, notamment ceux d'Afrique, la conservation de droits de douane apparaît comme une nécessité vitale face à la politique commerciale offensive de l'Europe. Inès Trépant analyse la conviction qu'affiche la Commission européenne de pouvoir, par les mêmes mécanismes, respecter son agenda économique et œuvrer au développement des pays pauvres. Elle souligne les contradictions qui traversent la politique extérieure de l'Union européenne en termes de conciliation de ses objectifs économiques, sociaux et environnementaux.

In the new, post-Cold War reality Polish foreign policy faced challenges stemming from the need to set targets that would reflect the interests of Poland, as well as take into account the changes in the international environment. Gradually, the assumptions and directions of foreign policy were rebuilt, with an aim to ensure the safety of the country in both internal and external dimension, to provide the territorial integrity, strengthen the sovereignty and create optimal conditions for the development of the state and society. After 1989, as a consequence of the concentration of efforts of Polish diplomacy on the implementation of strategic directions of foreign policy, others had a secondary meaning. Polish vital interests were located in the Euro-Atlantic area, in the immediate vicinity, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe, which is why in the first place all strengths and resources were engaged there in order to implement the strategic tasks of foreign policy; the Western Balkans remained on the sidelines, in the territory of former Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, this did not mean the total marginalization of the post- -Yugoslav region, and the perception of the events associated with the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation as not directly, but only indirectly connected with Polish interests.

Research Highlights and Abstract This article: Assesses the role of Caribbean offshore financial centres (OFCs) in FDI flows to China. Argues the OFC provides financial intermediation services beyond simply tax minimisation. Demonstrates a similar use of the OFC in other developing economies. Suggests the position of the OFC in global finance continues to evolve. This article examines the prominent location of offshore financial centres (OFCs) among the leading origin and destination points for foreign direct investment (FDI) to China. The OFC (characterised as a tax haven) frequently has been ignored or assumed out of analyses on Chinese FDI as simply servicing tax minimisation practices. This article challenges that assumption and emphasises the financial intermediation role performed by the Caribbean OFC beyond practices of tax arbitrage. Through the use of an international business company (IBC) registered in an OFC these jurisdictions perform several functions for investors, to include providing access to foreign capital markets, reducing tax obligations across multiple jurisdictions and concealing potential politically-sensitive beneficial ownership of the investment. This assessment for the role of the OFC in circuits of global capital involving FDI to China demonstrates that China's relationship with the OFC is different from that experienced by Europe and North America.

Over the last decade, sanctuary has been evoked as an alternative to the problems associated with an exclusionary statist asylum regime. In Canada, the United States, and Europe, a "cities of sanctuary" movement has emerged, articulated through various political vocabularies. This movement conceives of sanctuary not simply as a church-based site where asylum seekers may be secured but offers a host of welcoming practices within and beyond cities. This article specifically explores the UK-based City of Sanctuary movement, with a focus on the case of Glasgow, which has widely been read as exemplifying hospitality toward an empowerment of asylum seekers. It has been argued that while a statist discourse of fear—a "politics of unease"—posits migrants as a threat to be policed, the City of Sanctuary stimulates a softer approach. Yet, this article illustrates how the City of Sanctuary is also mobilizing a deeply troubling "politics of ease." Based on an ethnographic investigation, I show how a politics of ease renders intractable the serious problem of protracted waiting that many controls many asylum seekers. In doing so, I demonstrate how the seemingly hospitable City of Sanctuary in fact contributes to a hostile asylum regime by indefinitely deferring and even extending a temporality of waiting.

This article examines the British attempt to use the momentum created after the conclusion of the Locarno Agreements of October 1925 to promote a similar settlement in Central Europe among the Little Entente countries and Hungary, and in the Balkans, where Bulgaria had to be reconciled with her neighbours, particularly with Yugoslavia (Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), with each region being dealt with in a separate settlement. The approach of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, was to induce the leaders of the countries in question to come into personal contact and tackle their mutual antagonisms, while at the same time securing that Britain, France and Italy maintained a common stance and spoke with one voice to all the concerned governments. The article outlines the main lines of diplomatic intercourse and analyses the reasons for the ultimate failure of both 'Central European' and 'Balkan Locarno'. It is argued here that Chamberlain's policy, his distorted perceptions, delusive premises and fallacious judgement accounted for the inevitable breakdown of his Locarno-like scheme. This failure became apparent towards the end of the period studied here and its consequences heralded difficult times in the years to come.

Disponible en ligne: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/wgPXa2zPbncUPSTDxsgn/full ; International audience ; In Europe, the idea that coordinating transportation and urban planning is a necessary condition for setting sustainable urban development into motion has spread throughout academic and professional circles. While this concern is not new, the objectives underlying transport and urban planning coordination have deeply changed over the last decades. How have local authorities translated the requirements and objectives of national laws? How have they accounted for the evolution of these global objectives ? What factors explain innovation and continuity in the relationship between land use planning and transport policies? In a comparative research between Switzerland and France, we addressed the question of political change by reconstituting the "trajectories" of four urban areas: Geneva and Bern in Switzerland and Strasbourg and Bordeaux in France. We have described the policy paths of these urban areas since the end of the 1960's by focusing on the contents of master plans, the principal technical solutions and projects that have been implemented, and the means of inter-sectorial coordination used. For each case, factors of change or inertia have been identified by focusing on three main variables that are often studied alternatively in public policy analysis: ideas, institutions and interests.

International audience ; Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, various methods were used to integrate the ballistic differential equation and to calculate firing tables for the needs of artillery. Mathematicians, military engineers and artillerymen, although belonging to different milieus and different countries, collaborated and inspired themselves mutually through a regular interaction between analytic theory of differential equations, numerical and graphical techniques of integration, and empirical research by means of experimental measures. This research on the ballistic equation played the role of a laboratory where scientists have been able to test all possible approaches for calculating the solution of a differential equation. We will show how these trials, on the one hand, have allowed to improve some important points in the abstract theory of differential equations and, on the other hand, have contributed to give birth to numerical analysis as an autonomous discipline at the beginning of the 20th century. On the social and institutional point of view, the ballistic problem will permit us to analyze the links between civil and military scientific research in Europe at the time, and to put in evidence some differences in the national approaches observed in France, Germany, England and Italy.

This article focuses on the analysis of productivity and their relations in East Europe, primarily in Lithuania. The objective of this article is to analyse the working efficiency, or labour productivity of Lithuania companies, and to compare them on the Baltic Tiger (Baltic States) and European Union (EU) level. Industry, construction, trade and transport in Lithuania have been viewed separately. On labour productivity the company and its relationship to labour costs is directly dependent on the country's competitiveness. Wages make up the main part of labour costs. Labour market problems in Baltic and Eastern European countries have become more and more important. When the EU labour markets opened, some EU countries were forced to face the problem of partial workforce drain to richer countries with higher wages. In Eastern European countries - the new EU member states - the labour movement into the old EU member states, where salaries are higher, has become a serious problem. Labour productivity analysis showed that both Lithuania and the other Baltic States have successfully come out of recession. A number of proposals to increase labour productivity for both workers and entrepreneurs have been listed in the summary.

Fighting for a Living investigates the circumstances that have produced starkly different systems of recruiting and employing soldiers in different parts of the globe over the last 500 years. It does so on the basis of a wide range of case studies taken from Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East and Asia.The novelty of "Fighting for a Living" is that it is not military history in the traditional sense (concentrating at wars and battles or on military technology) but that it looks at military service and warfare as forms of labour, and at the soldiers as workers. Military employment offers excellent opportunities for this kind of international comparison. Where many forms of human activity are restricted by the conditions of nature or the stage of development of a given society, organized violence is ubiquitous. Soldiers, in one form or another, are always part of the picture, in any period and in every region. Nevertheless, Fighting for a Living is the first study to undertake a systematic comparative analysis of military labour. It therefore speaks to two distinct, and normally quite separate, communities: that of labour historians and that of military historians. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

This article adopts the trope of exile in order to investigate the visual and spatial displacement experienced by the artwork of certain female artists when, in the passage from one technology to the next, disappear and re-appear technically and poetically, 'surviving' in new critical forms of reception and understanding. The photographs that Emily Jacir collected in Where We Come From (2001-2003) re-appear on the pages of the 'book' devoted to Seeking Palestine (2012); Shilpa Gupta's digital installation I Have Many Dreams (2008) travels from Mumbai to Europe where it reaches the art exhibition DigitaLife-2012 held in Rome; Latifa Laâbissi's choreography Loredreamsong (2011) transforms the ephemerality of its live event into its virtual documentation within the digital archive of re.act.feminism # 2 (2008-2013). The 'book', the 'exhibition' and the 'digital archive' become the new 'homelands', the new contexts of 'survival', of the artists' originary performances. The Palestinian photographer Jacir, the Indian artist Gupta, and the Arab choreographer Laâbissi come from various geographical, political and cultural spaces, displaying, in their uses of languages and technologies, a critical art which proves the ability of women to survive beyond the difficulties of their 'exiled' existences by hoping, dreaming and resisting creatively.