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AbstractSocial networks and the internet both have a substantial individual effect on environmental activism in China. In this article, we speculate that social linking patterns between environmental actors, which often facilitate activism on the ground, may also exist in cyberspace in the form of an online network. The article addresses the following empirical questions. Does such an online network exist? If so, who are the constituent actors? Are these the same actors observed on the ground? In addressing these questions the article aims to contribute to the growing debate on the implications of the internet for the potential emergence of social movements in China.

This thematic section of Contributions to the History of Concepts takes up the necessity – and at the same time the problematic nature – of studying metaphors as a part of conceptual history. As Frank Beck Lassen argues in his article, "Regular, Dependable, Mechanical: J.F. Struensee on the State of Denmark," not only concepts but also metaphors must be considered by historians of political thought as politically significant figures of speech. Metaphors may constitute condensed political arguments, the applications of which play an important role in the continuous semantic struggle over the definition of political reality.

Personality traits have repeatedly been found to be reliable predictors of job performance. In this study of Chinese local government organizations, the relationships between job performance and two personality traits, agreeableness and conscientiousness, were examined. Conscientiousness
was as measured by Talents, a subscale taken from an indigenous scale, the Chinese Personality Scale (QZPS; Wang, Cui, & Zhou, 2005). As expected, talents were related to both task and contextual performance. However, agreeableness as measured by Kindness, from the same indigenous scale,
was related negatively to task performance, and showed no relationship with contextual performance.

This article makes use of a unique personnel data set and state administrative data to follow welfare and nonwelfare hires that separate from similar jobs with the same firm. Welfare hires are more likely to be on welfare after separation but are equally likely as similarly low–skilled nonwelfare hires to transition to another job after separation. Among those with a new job, welfare hires experience a significantly lower wage gain, suggesting that welfare hires would benefit (even more than nonwelfare hires) from focused assistance with job search and transition skills. (JEL H53, J62, C35)

AbstractHow much of infant behaviour can be accounted for by signal‐level analyses of stimuli? The current paper directly compares the moment‐by‐moment behaviour of 8‐month‐old infants in an audiovisual preferential looking task with that of several computational models that use the same video stimuli as presented to the infants. One type of model utilizes only signal‐level properties of visual motion whereas the other adds audiovisual integration (either through correlation or instantaneous addition of audio and visual signals). Together these models account for a significant portion of the variance in infant looking.

From 1999 to 2005 the former Red-Green government in Germany enacted a series of ambitious tax cuts that were snpposed to boost the German Economy. The article argues that these tax cuts instead of boosting the economy involved major costs. The revenue losses induced substantial expenditures cuts which reduced citizens' utility from public goods and services and at the same time dampened economic activity thereby extending Germany's stagnation. Additionally, they increased income disparity. In spite of these disillusioning experiences it is likely that German tax and fiscal policies are going to repeat their errors in the future.

This article analyzes the communicative practices that undergird the Positive Deviance approach to social change and its contributions to the curbing of girls' trafficking in rural Indonesia. Positive Deviance hinges on the premise that in every community there are individuals whose uncommon practices enable them to find better solutions to problems than their neighbours with access to the same resources. Our archival and field research in Indonesia indicates that Positive Deviance is time and skills intensive, yet it is also rich in communication and relational practices. It facilitates a unique vantage point to build human capital and sustain positive impacts.

Niniejsza monografia powstała w 2006 roku jako praca magisterska napisana pod kierunkiem profesora zw. dr hab. Krzysztofa T. Koneckiego w Instytucie Socjologii Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Pierwotnym celem badań Autorki było sporządzenie etnografii środowiska poetyckiego, przedstawienie podstawowych rodzajów prowadzonych aktywności, przybliżenie podzielanych ideologii, głównych problemów i usytuowanie ich w szerszej ramie przemian, jakie zachodzą we współczesnej kulturze. Jednak w trakcie prowadzenia badań terenowych pojawiło się szereg pytań ogniskujących się wokół poety i podejmowanych przez niego działań, które to pytania stały się dominujące i spowodowały, że na ten sam obszar badawczy zaczęłam spoglądać z innej perspektywy.

- This work examine the nature of the relation between Keynesianism and the theories of development economics, pinpointing the consistencies and differences existing between them. In this respect a Keynesian heritage is unquestionable and can even be discerned in the vicissitudes of many development economists' lives. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that some foundational concepts of the development debate cannot be ascribed to any Keynesian genealogy, and must rather be traced back to classical categories. The eclecticism of early development economics makes the so-called label of Keynesian consensus too narrow a concept.

The article considers the optimal research and development subsidy regime in a two‐firm two‐country model where each firm is "located" in a specific country. Trade is intra‐industry in that customers in both countries purchase from both firms. The article suggests that when both countries subsidize their local firm usually welfare increases compared to the case of zero subsidies. Making the same comparison, profit always falls in the symmetric game and falls about half the time in the asymmetric game. These results call into question some common notions about corporate welfare. (JEL O38, H25, F23)

In June 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rocked the food
industry—and food lovers—with its warning about tainted tomatoes.
Consumers in New Mexico and Texas were contracting a rare, sometimes
fatal strain of salmonella and the FDA feared that salmonella
contamination from tomatoes was the cause. In the weeks that
followed, a major outbreak spread across the country and worried
consumers abandoned tomatoes. Fourth of July cookouts were not the
same, and BLT lovers complained that their favorite sandwich was
impossibly dry. By the end of July, the outbreak had infected more
than 1,200 persons in 42 states.

Résumé La population des loups s'est considérablement accrue durant ces dernières années en Suède, provoquant de nombreux conflits au sein de la société. Tandis que les citadins et les autorités publiques sont plutôt en faveur d'une stricte protection de ces animaux, les ruraux et les éleveurs de rennes Sames déplorent de plus en plus les préjudices causés par leur présence. Malgré la politique nationale de protection, le nombre de loups tués illégalement augmente chaque année. Aussi peut-on parler aujourd'hui en Suède d'un conflit à dimension ethnique qui divise la société entre urbanité et ruralité.

Rapid economic growth in India demanded quality logistical services, implying that dry ports, often characterized by inefficiency, would play pivotal roles. While the Indian government attempted to address this problem by introducing foreign private participation, at the same time, it upheld its social-democratic tradition where local operators and interests should not be edged out by external competition. Hence, it is the endeavour of this paper to investigate how the Indian government resolved these contradictory issues and provided insight on how political influences could shape an industry's competitive structure, especially in developing economies.

We model EU-type carbon emissions control in a group of countries to explore the distributional incidence of mixed policies that consist of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) and of emissions taxes overlapping with the ETS. Such policies impact on national welfares through both the overlapping taxes and the distribution of national emissions caps. Our main proposition is an equivalence result stating that for every mixed policy, there exists an ETS policy without overlapping taxes yielding the same levels of national welfare as the mixed policy. We also suggest two measures of the net distributional incidence of mixed policies.

International audience ; Yield spreads (corrected for exchange rate risk) over 10-year German securities of European Union countries that did not join EMU experienced an average decrease of 14.20 basis points during the first three years after the beginning of Currency Union. Conversely, Euro-area countries' adjusted spreads registered an average rise of 11.98 basis points in the same period. This paper examines the elements (a possible change in the relative importance of domestic or international risk factors) behind these results using both panel estimations in the two groups of countries and a country-by-country specification in each of them