L. Daniel Maxim and William Cartwright
The past few years have witnessed a substantial growth in development and use of computerized financial planning models. Success stories involving the use of planning models…
Abstract
The past few years have witnessed a substantial growth in development and use of computerized financial planning models. Success stories involving the use of planning models abound but so, alas, do failures. Having had our share of each in the past several years, we thought it might be useful to pass along some lessons learned.
Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman
This paper utilizes controversies over the role of a set of insecticides in mass honey bee die-offs in two different national contexts – France and the United States – in order to…
Abstract
This paper utilizes controversies over the role of a set of insecticides in mass honey bee die-offs in two different national contexts – France and the United States – in order to understand the science-state nexus in a comparative manner. On the one hand, the French government in 1999 and 2004 suspended the commercial use of the insecticidal products that beekeepers suspected of causing the honey bee declines. On the other hand, the US government has to date refused to heed beekeepers’ calls to limit the usage of the very same set of insecticides. We examine why the governments of France and the United States came to contrasting conclusions regarding broadly similar technoscientific issues. The divergent outcomes, we argue, are not simply the result of predetermined differences in the two states’ regulatory paradigms (with France being “precautionary,” and the United States adhering to a “sound science” approach), but are underpinned by divergent forms of beekeepers’ resistance. The paper further sheds light on non-state actors’ use of science and state to contest state (in)action by analyzing how historically influenced differences in state structures, the relational dynamics of beekeepers’ and farmers’ organizations, and the epistemic cultures of honey bee knowledge production, shaped different forms of resistance and influence in France and the United States.
While working on the final draft of Das Kapital Volume I, Marx discovered that the assumption that he had previously held: as it circulated capital extended its sphere of…
Abstract
While working on the final draft of Das Kapital Volume I, Marx discovered that the assumption that he had previously held: as it circulated capital extended its sphere of operation and at the same time absorbed earlier forms of economic organization was not supported by empirical evidence. From 1869 he began to study how in fact capital began to circulate in Russia, a country which had begun to create a capitalist economy after the liberation of the peasantry in 1861. Marx was aided in this project by Nikolai Danielson, who sent him materials on the Russian economy and who himself made a study of contemporary trends in Russian economic development. Marx contributed to the article Danielson published in 1880 on this subject. One of the works Marx acquired was the book by Vorontsov, who concurred with Danielson that only some features of capitalism were present in the Russian economy and that peasants were dispossessed without being re-deployed in capitalist enterprises. Marx died without incorporating his Russian material into the second volume of Das Kapital. Engels failed to see any problem with the circulation of capital and published the manuscripts as he found them, dispersing Marx’s Russian materials. Unlike Danielson, Engels was convinced that Russia’s economic development did not differ in any way from that of Western Europe, a conviction shared by Plekhanov and Lenin, who classed Danielson and Vorontsov as “narodniki.” Lenin’s book The Development of Capitalism in Russia is a polemic against Danielson and Vorontsov, but does not directly address the points they made.
A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balanceeconomics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary toman′s finding the good life and society enduring…
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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.
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Claire Hines and Stephanie Jones
As Bond scholarship has shown, men’s magazines played a crucial role in shaping images of masculinity that circulated around James Bond from the 1960s onwards (Hines, 2018). More…
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As Bond scholarship has shown, men’s magazines played a crucial role in shaping images of masculinity that circulated around James Bond from the 1960s onwards (Hines, 2018). More generally, critics have charged both the Bond film franchise and men’s magazines with perpetuating sexist imagery that upholds patriarchal values or erodes the gains of feminism. Yet close readings of men’s magazines and Bond films can produce a more complex picture of masculinity and gender relations, especially since the mid-1990s saw not only the return of James Bond to the screen following a six-year production break, but also scholarly and media attention to masculinity and significant growth in the men’s magazine market, including the rise of lad mags. This research will analyse magazine content relating to Bond in British men’s magazines during the Pierce Brosnan era, beginning with the launch of the 1995 film GoldenEye, to examine the interrelationship between James Bond as a longstanding male icon, and contemporary models of masculinity characterised by this publishing phenomenon. It will argue that these men’s magazines become an important site for (re)negotiating James Bond’s culturally loaded masculinity throughout the Brosnan years.
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In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still…
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In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.
The reduction of the “metabolism” of the human economy has become one of the central themes of recent environmental and economic research and policy focused upon paths for…
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The reduction of the “metabolism” of the human economy has become one of the central themes of recent environmental and economic research and policy focused upon paths for achieving global sustainable development. Since the late 1980s, there has emerged a diverse array of “physical economy” approaches that utilise some form of material flow analysis (MFA) to quantify the pattern of flows of material and energy into, within, and out of the economic system. In principle, the reduction of the human socioeconomic metabolism, and appropriate changes in technology and consumption, are highly consistent with Buddhist economics. Indeed, MFA may be one of the most valuable devices for encouraging and implementing a global “green” technoeconomic paradigm that helps realize the type of benefits proffered under the vision of Buddhist economics. This paper describes the links between methodology or potential application of MFA and the central themes of the Buddhist economic path to the long‐term, harmonious co‐existence of humans within the natural environment.
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In the animal world the presence of entropy necessitates contest. Among the non‐human mammals the contests are overwhelmingly inter‐specific. On the other hand the bulk of human…
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In the animal world the presence of entropy necessitates contest. Among the non‐human mammals the contests are overwhelmingly inter‐specific. On the other hand the bulk of human contests are intra‐specific. They bring about a dissipation in human systems akin to that brought on by noise in natural systems (“human noise”). Just as the engineering of natural systems hinges on the successful understanding of noise and its filtration, so the successful administration of human systems must hinge on the understanding of human noise and its filtration. In this paper, after demarcating the concepts of communication, teleology, contest and inquiry and their stochastic foundations, we shall (1) show that post‐Weber administrative theory, unlike the more classical, is delinquent in its neglect of human noise, (2) list the lacunae in the prevailing theory, (3) explain the greater efficiency of the administration of warfare in contrast to that of more humane projects, (4) expound the Parkinson maxims on the human noise specific to a Weberian bureaucracy, (5) show how this together with widespread corruption results in ineffective government, and finally, (6) suggest how systems analysts might approach this problem.