Suchergebnisse

On March 24, 2004, Ireland became the first country in the world to implement legislation prohibiting tobacco smoking in workplaces and enclosed public places. The political process leading up to the legislation was long, with opposition from stakeholders with a range of vested interests, particularly the tobacco industry.1 Despite predictions otherwise, the legislation achieved high levels of compliance from the outset, has proved extremely popular, and established a global role model that many countries have now adopted.

The Mexican Revolution can be seen as an effort to promote the modernization of that nation's society and institutions. Social scientists and historians agree that modernization is a complex process, including social, political, economic, and intellectual factors which evolve in different patterns and at different rates according to the particular circumstances under consideration. In terms of social change, political scientist S. N. Eisenstadt, and historian C. E. Black have isolated at least two trends that are of relevance to Mexican education in the 1930S: (1) an increased interest in urban as opposed to rural matters, and (2) the conflict between the representatives of a traditional elitist culture and the advocates of mass society based on modern technology.

The recent controversy over the "Baby Doe" regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services represents the culmination of a dilemma that has faced the medical and legal professions for more than a decade. Although they have not been upheld by the courts, the regulations express the position that withholding treatment from defective newborns may constitute discrimination on the basis of handicap and advocate mechanisms for the reporting of such practices. Legislation regarding this issue is pending at both the national and state levels. The rulings have been disputed by many medical and professional groups, which are working to provide acceptable alternatives.

Black America in 1970 was weary and frustrated. Old targets of its assaults on racial injustice were becoming more elusive and were changing their shapes through disguises. Demonstrations for pure civil rights causes resulted in fewer concessions. Charismatic black leaders, once able to stir the national conscience almost at will, had gone to the mountaintop. Riots had proved ruinous. Rhetoric was boring. The voices of old allies were raised in eulogy of "the movement."Cynicism enveloped black America like a fog, so sure were blacks that they had been placed near the bottom of the list of national priorities. For blacks knew that their aspirations remained unfulfilled, and they knew that minority participation in the affairs of the nation was still circumscribed by a variety of hostile forces. Not the least of the latter was the notion in white America that judicial pronouncements and legislation of the sixties had lifted the black man's burden; that it was time to back away from black programs and turn with some urgency to "business as usual."

The literature on the theory of regional industrial success, including that focused on regional innovation systems, provides the conceptual foundation for this exploration of the extent to which firms in clusters of advanced technology industry depend on interregional sources for a wide variety of knowledge inputs to support innovation. The substantive focus is the electronics cluster of the Toronto region, Canada's largest manufacturing center. A small, stratified sample of establishments drawn from this cluster is used to verify the importance of external sources of material inputs, and other knowledge sources, and the strength of distant market connections. Interregional and local collaboration vary in importance as a result of scale-dependent resource differences between firms and in response to choices associated with foreign rather than domestic ownership. The results support the rejection of simple models of clusters and learning regions in which internal connections are privileged over interregional and international transactions operating either between or within firms.