Suchergebnisse

Introduction: urbanism and Japanese modern -- World War One and the city idea -- The ideology of the metropolis -- Colonizing the country -- The past in the present -- The cult of the new -- Epilogue: urbanism and twentieth-century Japan

For many intellectual historians, presentism is viewed as a cardinal sin—linked to unreflective anachronism and the inappropriate projection of present-day values onto a very different past context. However, by embracing the ways in which the present inevitably shapes our modes of inquiry, our historical interests, and even the moral underpinnings of our analysis, we can find in the present tools that can make our history better, and help make sense of historical debates and controversies. This essay gives an account of Japanese historiography organized around four versions of presentism. The first is political presentism, an analytic lens that emerged in the "objectivity debate" over what constituted politicized scholarship and reflected the political antagonisms of the Cold War in Asia. Consciously or unconsciously, political convictions shape our scholarship. The second version is the presentism of social context. Each decade that followed the Asia–Pacific War possessed its particular zeitgeist, and histories written during those moments were products of their time. The third form of presentism is the connection between past and present via analogy or likeness: using a past event or person to understand the present and vice versa. To analogize past and present means finding a correspondence that makes the past feel familiar and less "other." The fourth version of presentism is the project of contemporary history: the past in the present, the past leading to the present, the present as the starting point for historical inquiry.

This paper focuses on Rong and Wilkinson's (2011) recognition of market orientation as process related and considers the implications for research into these processes. Considered are the nature and role of processes and mechanisms by which firms "orient" to the markets in which they operate. Research into processes and their mechanisms represent an important but neglected area of research into firms' market activities. Methods that can be used to study processes are considered with agent-based simulation highlighted as a particularly fruitful way of doing so.

Discount rates are widely used in the public sector to assess policy proposals where costs and benefits accrue over long time periods. Socially optimal policy choices require an appropriate choice of discount rate. This paper assesses the applicability of the two key theoretical approaches to selecting discount rates in the public sector. The two key theoretical approaches considered are the social rate of time preference and the social opportunity cost. Estimation issues in determining the rate using these two approaches are reviewed. The social rate of time preference is considered to be the appropriate approach. When estimates of the social rate of time preference are unavailable or clearly unreliable and the Government is considering financing a project, the social opportunity cost should be used. The social opportunity cost can be used as a proxy for the social rate of time preference. The paper presents an example using the capital asset pricing model in a weighted average cost of capital formula to determine a social opportunity cost.