bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Duality beyondPersons and Groups
Authors: Mützel Sophie , Breiger Ronald
Published: December 2020

This chapter focuses on the general principle of duality, which was originally introduced by Simmel as the intersection of social circles. In a seminal article, Breiger formalized Simmel’s idea, showing how two-mode types of network data can be transformed into one-mode networks. This formal translation proved to be fundamental for social network analysis, which no longer needed data on who interacted with whom but could work with other types of data. In turn, it also proved fundamental for the analysis of how the social is structured in general, as many relations are dual (e.g. persons and groups, authors and articles, organizations and practices), and are thus susceptible to an analysis according to duality principles. The chapter locates the concept of duality within past and present sociology. It also discusses the use of duality in the analysis of culture as well as in affiliation networks. It closes with recent developments and future directions.
Hell and the Devil
Authors: Gin Lum Kathryn
Published: December 2020

This essay considers how the development of hell and the devil in the early Christian tradition influenced their history in the specific context of the region that would become the United States. The essay argues that, while hell and the devil have often reflected the nation’s open cultural wounds and political sores, the concepts also carry real moral weight for believers as ways of addressing the problem of evil. The essay surveys the range of American engagements with hell and the devil, from deep moral anxiety and the politics of fear to popular entertainment. It also looks at how moral anxiety, political fear, and pop culture could become entangled, as in nineteenth-century temperance tracts and contemporary evangelical graphic tracts and hell houses.
The Rapture in American Imagination
Authors: Pippin Tina
Published: December 2020

The Rapture is the sudden and hoped for event of the second coming of Jesus Christ in the clouds to raise true Christian believers to heaven. American popular culture has played with this scenario in a variety of genres (e.g., television, film, novels), most often in a satirical way. From the faith perspective, the Rapture is a major theme in Christian fiction (the Left Behind series) and follows a timeline of political and historical events. Representations of the Rapture in popular culture often reflect the current political climate and the psychological anxiety, isolation, and sense of persecution of believers.
Apocalypse and Video Games
Authors: Wagner Rachel
Published: December 2020

Though it might seem surprising at first, video games can work a lot like apocalypses. Both offer imaginary visits to otherworldly spaces that were designed to offer metaphysical comfort. Both, through theology or programming, allow us to temporarily enter into structured spaces that are more predictable than our own world. However, instead of depicting God as the means of control over the world, as apocalypses do, some video games place the player in the position of realizing renewed order through the performance of virtual violence. This chapter considers how the video game Darksiders draws on biblical apocalyptic imagery and also utilizes traditional apocalyptic elements like an us-versus-them structure, the glorification of violence, and a desire for renewed order in the world. Darksiders also reorients the agency of order-making, placing the player at the center of the action and depicting God as largely absent from human struggle. Games like Darksiders may comfort uneasy players, just as apocalypses do, by depicting a world that can be controlled. But they typically do so in a way that demands virtual violence of the player, calling us to question what role such games may play in shaping how we see ourselves in the real world.
Teaching Bible and American Popular Culture
Authors: Webster Jane S.
Published: December 2020

Educators often need help to design courses that lead to transformative learning. This paper outlines a practical approach to course design drawing on the scholarship of teaching and learning, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and current work in the field. Starting with relevant and urgent student learning outcomes (such as biblical literacy and spiritual quest), effective courses build a series of learning opportunities that enable students to discover content, construct meaning, and create something new. By engaging in the Bible with, in, and alongside of popular culture, students learn more about the Bible, culture, and the relationship between the two. The context of a meta-question requires them to reflect on such essential human concerns as the nature of authority, the construction of identity, and the contextualization of truth. In this way, learning becomes transformative.
Metaphors and Analogies as Heuristics in Policymaking
Authors: Zhang Qingmin
Published: December 2020

Metaphors and analogies are two of the most popular heuristics utilized by decision makers, promoting an unconscious inference into the realm of rationality within the mind. A master of metaphor and analogy, the late leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao Zedong, offers an illuminating example of such heuristic reasoning. Analyzing the metaphors and analogies most frequently invoked by the PRC leader, this chapter demonstrates that Mao’s conceptual system was highly metaphorical. While historical analogies explain Mao’s heuristic reasoning for China’s revolutionary diplomacy, his use of metaphors reveals how stereotypes influenced his understanding of his enemies, which in turn explained and shaped China’s major foreign policy decisions. Mao’s use/misuse of metaphors and analogies also showcases their fallacies, mainly their tendency to exaggerate similarities and move from the realization that something is like something else to assuming that something is exactly like something else.
The Mesopotamian Context of Ezekiel
Authors: Bodi Daniel
Published: December 2020

The book of Ezekiel explicitly locates its material in Babylon between the years 593 and 571 BCE. The book’s language and imagery correspond to that setting. This chapter surveys the rich research of the book’s Mesopotamian context in three areas: comparative cultural elements, iconography and imagery, and philological research. The abundance of the evidence demonstrates that the prophet’s activity took place mainly in Babylonia, influencing the language, metaphors, content, and rich imagery of the book that bears his name and is essential for reconstructing the book’s composition.
US Law Relating to Noncommunicable Diseases
Authors: Parmet Wendy E.
Published: December 2020

This chapter examines US laws that seek to reduce the prevalence of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) by targeting the sale, marketing, or use of the products with which they are associated. It reviews some of the broad debates that have helped shape the US response to NCDs, such as concerns about paternalism, individual responsibility, and the appropriate role for law regarding noncommunicable health threats. It also examines the allocation of authority between US jurisdictions to address NCDs. This chapter provides an overview of key US laws and policies that relate to tobacco, unhealthy foods, firearms, and opioids. It tackles the roles of the regulation of commercial speech and the First Amendment's protection for speech on reducing the threat of NCDs.
Rural Indonesian Youths’ Conceptions of Success
Authors: Larasati Rara Sekar , Wood Bronwyn E. , Laksana Ben K. C.
Published: December 2020

Pierre Bourdieu is a preeminent Northern theorist whose concepts and ideas have been applied extensively in global youth studies. Yet Bourdieu has been critiqued for his assumptions of cultural homogeneity and failure to include local voices in his theory making. Therefore, the question arises: Are Bourdieu’s concepts still useful for research in the Global South? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a remote Indonesian village (Ngadas), this essay interrogates Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capitals in explaining young people’s conceptions of ‘success.’ In contrast to acquisition of capital for individual distinction and competitive advantage, Ngadas youth accumulate capital in order to maintain collective harmony and sustain a gift-giving cycle (guyub rukun). This study presents an expanded understanding of capital as a collective endeavor which challenges narrow interpretations of Bourdieu in the context of Southern youth studies and suggests the need for more contextually nuanced usage of his theories. It is central to the merging theory of navigational capacities which draws on Bourdieu’s notion of capitals but places emphasis on the collective nature of these capitals.
Silence as Collective Resistance among Adivasi Youth in India
Authors: Wadhwa Gunjan
Published: December 2020

In modern social democracies, ideas about participation and resistance are generally understood through the actions of citizens, in relation to the state, with individual agency assumed to exist in both participation and resistance. This essay critiques modern liberal conceptualizations of agency and resistance as inadequate for understanding contexts of violence, conflict, and precarity, such as those of Adivasi youth in India. The emphasis on active participation in the state renders acts of (dis)engagement with governance structures unintelligible. Terms like agency and resistance need to account for the multiple configurations of power that operate in and beyond communities, as well as acts such as silence and nonparticipation, which do not simply mean disaffection or apathy. These actions cannot be understood within liberal conceptualizations of citizens participating in the workings of the state and require new theoretical frameworks and analytical tools to render these collective silences audible.
Luxury Business in Japan
Authors: Donzé Pierre-Yves
Published: December 2020

Since the 1980s, Japan has been one of the largest markets for the luxury business. It made a large contribution toward shaping this global industry. Most international research in management and social sciences on the Japanese luxury market emphasises its specificities, regarding Western markets, in terms of consumer behaviour, distribution system, and adaptation of goods. Based on case studies of Burberry, Christian Dior, and Louis Vuitton, this chapter discusses the various strategies adopted by Western companies to enter the Japanese market, how they changed their strategy over time, and what they learnt from this market. At the same time, Japanese luxury companies faced difficulties to expand outside their domestic market. Exploring the examples of Mikimoto and Seiko, this chapter argues that cultural factors and brand management are the most important factors accounting for this weakness.
The Time Dimension in Comparative Research
Authors: Sordi Bernardo
Published: December 2020

This chapter explains that the comparison of legal phenomena has always implied, alongside a synchronic and spatial juxtaposition, a certain relevance of the time factor. Here, the comparative method sought to develop a more complex and multi-faceted interpretation of the law, free from the constraints of national borders and sovereign states. It intended to reveal complexity, and to draw different legal experiences closer together. In so doing, it necessarily embraced the dimension of change and diversity. The comparative method and the historical method are thus rarely seen as antithetical; more often than not, the two approaches are jointly applied in an investigation that seeks to combine the synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The chapter reveals, however, that the dialogue between history and comparison was far from straightforward. At no time was the diachronic perspective pre-eminent, or capable of absorbing and guiding the comparative study. It rather limited itself to playing an essentially secondary, subservient role.
Administrative Law Beyond the State
Authors: della Cananea Giacinto
Published: December 2020

This chapter focuses on the changing relationship between administrative law and the nation-state. The starting point is, simply, that the nation-state now operates in an increasingly complex web of national, transnational, and supranational legal processes. The chapter asserts that this is no mere incremental change. Arguably, it requires us to reconsider, both normatively and empirically, the traditional paradigm according to which administrative law is a sort of national enclave. Normatively, it is important to understand that at the basis of this paradigm there is not just a set of ideas and beliefs about the particularities of each national legal culture or tradition, but there is a certain vision of the state. Empirically, there are various forms of interaction between national, international, and supranational legal orders that are worth considering. As such, the chapter draws upon some case studies and argues that the jurisprudence of international and supranational courts can help us to understand both why the general principles shared by most, if not all, legal orders are relevant for the public authorities that act beyond the states and why such principles must be taken into account within national systems.
Public/Private
Authors: Auby Jean-Bernard
Published: December 2020

This chapter examines the distinction between public law and private law. It stresses the importance of being aware of this difference between the public/private and public law/private law dichotomies. The public–private divide is universal even if, from one society to another, it can be conceived differently in certain ways. All human communities have an idea about the relationship between the private sphere and the public domain. By contrast, the distinction between public law and private law is not universal. It may be ignored, rejected, or confined to a very limited sphere of operation as, traditionally, in common law systems. Conversely, the public law/private law distinction may be understood as an essential feature of the juridical world, as was the approach of Roman law, inherited by the continental legal systems.
Through ‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’
Authors: Fisher Elizabeth
Published: December 2020

While the lack of comparative administrative law scholarship and intellectual interchange across jurisdictions is often noted, comparative regulatory study is a thriving analytical enterprise. This chapter considers the relationship between these two fields of scholarly endeavour to show the interaction between them is a complex and nuanced one. Three issues are highlighted. First, there is a significant overlap between administrative law and regulatory studies. Second, comparative scholarship about administrative law and regulation is being carried on for many different reasons and in many different ways. Third, a more meaningful distinction to draw than between administrative law and regulatory studies, is between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ accounts of regulation and administrative law. A thin comparative account tends to prevail in regulatory studies, reflecting the dominance of thin policy discourses. In contrast, comparative administrative law scholarship tends towards providing thicker accounts, reflecting the general thickness of legal discourse. But these are only tendencies. More importantly, thin and thick accounts have their strengths and weaknesses, and are also interdependent on each other.
An Anglo-American Tradition
Authors: Cane Peter
Published: December 2020

This chapter explores the idea of a ‘tradition’ of comparative administrative law (CAL) in the trans-Atlantic Anglosphere. It first deals with a period from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. At this time, Western comparative public law was predominantly an Anglo-European affair. The chapter next focuses on a period between about 1880 and 1940, a time of heavy intellectual traffic between England and the US, in which the birth of an identifiably Anglo-American tradition in comparative administrative law may be witnessed. Finally, the chapter is concerned with the impact on the Anglo-American tradition of the US Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The APA marked the maturation of American administrative law as a legal category concerned above all with judicial control of administrative power.
Information Management
Authors: Spiecker genannt Doehmann Indra
Published: December 2020

This chapter describes the different phases of information management. It explains why certain legal problems arise and which different regulatory approaches can be taken. Many EU and Member States’ regulatory activities have centred around information and its many regulatory issues. However, the approach has been neither comprehensive nor structured and consequential. Rather, information management, particularly within the general administrative and administrative procedural law, gives the impression, if looked at in detail, of a patchwork of regulatory ideas and instruments widely apart from each other. Thus, the chapter concentrates on an overall view which allows us to understand why the approach to information management differs in various legal systems.
Courts and Judicial Review
Authors: Thio Li-Ann
Published: December 2020

The legal culture, political context, and organization of any one national state is key to apprehending the role of courts and judicial review in upholding the rule of law and the administrative state. Constitutional principles like the separation of powers, basic rights, and governance priorities like efficiency will shape the scope, intensity, and grounds of judicial review, which actors are susceptible to it, and questions of standing. Different ideological communities place varying emphasis on these factors. Models of judicial review, based on the French special administrative courts or English common law courts of general jurisdiction, were first developed in Western liberal democracies. These have been influential exports beyond Europe, although susceptible to autochthonous adaptations informed by local culture and exigencies. This chapter examines the chief features of courts and judicial review in Western liberal democracies, where the function of judicial review has gone beyond ensuring legality and conformity of administrative processes to standards of substantive and procedural fairness, to include protecting fundamental rights and promoting participatory democracy in the rule-making process. It examines how judicial review operates, similarly or distinctly, under other government regimes beyond liberal democratic orders, within non-liberal developmental states with communitarian cultures and socialist legal systems.
The Politics of Australia’s Economic Development
Authors: Bell Stephen , Keating Michael
Published: December 2020

This chapter reviews the history of state–economy relations in Australia since the late nineteenth century. Although Australia is typically categorized as a liberal market economy, this chapter argues that the state has been of central importance in shaping and managing the Australian economy over time. The chapter outlines the changing role of the state in the Australian economy, a process typically shaped by alterations to state–economy relations following major economic crises, such as the Depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, as well as the stagflationary crisis of the 1970s, which ushered in more market-based, neoliberal forms of economic policy. The chapter’s key argument for the contemporary era is that supply-side-focused neoliberal policies have run their course, and that a new demand-side policy focus aimed at dealing with weak aggregate demand, inequality, and flat wages is now required in order to spur aggregate demand and economic growth.
Religion and Politics
Authors: Maddox Marion
Published: December 2020

Religious and secular institutions, forces and impulses have intersected repeatedly in Australian political life, not always along clear-cut lines. This chapter begins by analysing ways in which settler society sometimes deemed Indigenous peoples too irreligious for full participation in the new (Christian) polity, and at other times found their traditions too religious to be recognized under (secular) Australian law. It then considers how ideas of the Australian nation have assumed and disputed religious foundations. Religious institutions and their members have played prominent parts in party politics and in public policy. After considering key examples, the chapter reverses the standard analysis by considering how politics has shaped religion.
New Public Management and Service Privatization in Australia
Authors: O’Sullivan Siobhan
Published: December 2020

Since at least the 1980s, New Public Management (NPM) has had a dramatic impact on public service delivery in Australia. NPM is a contested concept, but it is often closely associated with making government more businesslike, using a range of techniques such as the establishment of quasi-markets for the delivery of goods and services by private companies that work for government on short-term contracts. Australia’s strong embrace of NPM principles is most evident in its transformation of welfare-to-work under the Keating and Howard governments. Yet the evolution of Australia’s employment services system also points to some of the unresolved tensions inherent in NPM. In particular, the Australian experience suggests that it is difficult to strike a balance between maintaining control in a way that meets the expectations of citizens and allowing private companies freedom to innovate and capitalize.
Classical Daoist Meditation, 400–100 bce
Authors: Roth Harold D.
Published: December 2020

Daoism is the indigenous Chinese religious tradition that has been a major feature of this culture for over two thousand years. It is grounded in a comprehensive cosmology of the Way (Dao) that derives from the ancient practice of a meditation that emphasizes attentional focus and mental tranquility attained through an apophatic (self-negating) practice of systematically emptying consciousness of its normal contents. These foundational ideas are present in a series of surviving works that include the famous Laozi and Zhuangzi, which have recently been supplemented by newly excavated texts and newly appreciated extant ones known for millennia. They contain a meditative practice that has been called “inner cultivation” and that emphasizes methods that develop concentration in order to empty the mind of all common thoughts, desires, emotions, and perceptions. These lead ultimately to self-transcending experiences in which adepts experience a complete union with the non-dual Way. The return to dualistic consciousness is accompanied by a fresh and transformed cognition in which adepts are able to spontaneously and effortlessly act in harmony with all new circumstances. This flowing cognition is able to effect transformations in other people and in the body politic and so becomes part of the arcana of government advocated to local kings by the scholar-practitioners of this tradition. These apophatic methods constitute one of the main contemplative practice streams within the Daoist religious tradition and its continuities with later Daoism are detailed by Louis Komjathy in another chapter of this volume.
Meditation and the Brain in Health and Disease
Authors: Fox Kieran C. R. , Cahn B. Rael
Published: December 2020

The aim of this chapter is to provide an accessible introduction to the neuroscience of meditation. First, a review of studies examining the relationship between meditation and alterations in the structure of the brain’s grey and white matter (so-called morphometric neuroimaging) is offered. Next, the chapter discusses findings from functional neuroimaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans, and what they have taught us about the brain’s patterns of activity during different forms of meditation, how meditation alters the brain’s response to various tasks and experiences, and how the expertise of long-term meditators might be harnessed to help us explore subtle aspects of human cognition. Third, the chapter reviews electrophysiological methods of measuring brain activity during meditation, such as electroencephalography (EEG), and how these findings relate to what we have learned from morphometric and functional neuroimaging. Finally, there is a discussion of the implications of this research and of meditation more generally for brain health and psychological well-being. Specifically, the discussion focuses on how meditation might offset the deficits related to cognitive aging, as well as help ameliorate the symptoms and underlying neural substrates associated with neurodegenerative and psychiatric disease.
Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)
Authors: Lloyd-Fox Sarah
Published: December 2020

Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) provides an essential bridge between our knowledge of adult human brain function and our current understanding of the developing brain. The capacity for fNIRS to provide localized measures of functional activation within awake and mobile infants, combined with a low set-up time and high tolerance to movement, far outweigh the limitations of fNIRS. To date, fNIRS has been applied to the study of object processing, social cognition, language, attention, learning and memory, functional connectivity, and recently to social and affective touch. Furthermore, it has been adopted by researchers targeting specific developmental populations including developmental disorders, cochlear implants and hearing loss, prematurity, and global health environmental and psychosocial risk factors. As fNIRS research continues to rapidly expand, it is paramount that the interpretation of, and subsequent claims arising from, fNIRS data are informed by a clear understanding of the complexities of fNIRS measurements.
A Library in Progress
Authors: Chambliss Melanie
Published: December 2020

Libraries function as more than just repositories of information: they produce knowledge, and they create and fill absences worthy of examination. This chapter explores the early history of the Moorland Foundation Library at Howard University and the absences that this collection was designed to address. The Moorland Foundation started as the personal library of Howard trustee Jesse Moorland, who accumulated books, pamphlets, pictures, and other items about African diasporic history. Moorland used this material for his own private study, but Howard professors Kelly Miller and Alain Locke saw the potential for a research collection and comprehensive bibliography that would respond to needs on campus and in their respective fields. Although it would take the hiring of librarian Dorothy Porter to fulfill these professors’ ambitions, the three distinct ideas behind this one collection demonstrate the versatility of Black thought and the motivations behind Black collecting.
What is a Book?
Authors: Cummings Brian
Published: December 2020

The book is difficult to define, caught between a physical object, usually rectangular, made by tying together a stack of pages so that one side is bound and fixed, and the other free and loose; and an intellectual object, one that delimits a project that is self-sufficient and of reasonably substantial (though indeterminate) length. Clearly these physical and non-physical definitions are intimately related, yet they also involve considerable philosophical indeterminacy. A book is both finite and indefinite, open and restricted. This chapter considers both dimensions of the book, arguing that object and idea are inseparable. It discusses the 5,000 year history of the book from cuneiform to the Kindle, and theories of the book from Augustine to Petrarch, or from Freud to Heidegger. It is divided into five sections: the Book as Object; Contents; Metaphor; Technology; and Machine.
Reading Platforms
Authors: Tenen Dennis Yi
Published: December 2020

Reflecting on the history and future of the book, the chapter imagines several possible alternatives to electronic texts as we know them today. The terms “platform” and “format” guide a speculative exploration through an archive of extant literary technologies—micrographic prints, Computexts, HyperCards, and ePUBs—and consideration of these distant materialities and their associated practices, interfaces, and affordances. The way in which a book’s spine or a reading chair realign the positions of the back, eye, and hand suggests another type of structuring when reading electronically, within environments made of polymer, rare metals, and liquid crystal. How does one mold the human senses to fit such alien media? The history of electronic books ultimately attests to the process of trans-mediation, contested at the boundary of hardware—paper or silicon—and software—body and code.
Islam, Law, and the State
Authors: Müller Dominik M.
Published: December 2020

In the ever-growing corpus of anthropological scholarship addressing Islam and Muslim lifeworlds, comparably few studies centre on the intersections of Islam, law, and state power. This chapter begins with an introduction to some classical legal anthropological works that were influential in fields such as Islamic courtroom ethnography, disputing, and legal pluralism and that reflected on positivistic reconfigurations of the sharia caused by (post)colonial forces, most of which were not overly interested in the state as a core object of empirical and analytic enquiry. The chapter then shifts attention to more recent works that have opened up new directions and dealt increasingly with Islam’s intricate and contingent relationships with law, the state, and wider legal politics in specific contextual settings, factoring in overlapping sovereignties such as marketization in the religious and political field. These studies address, for example, the (trans)formation of sharia norms in corporate workplace settings, halal politics and related state-market dynamics, and the societal workings of state attempts to govern and bureaucratize Islam. They derive their strength from long-term ethnographic endeavours that follow social actors into spheres where they render the sharia meaningful, often in ways that would not immediately be associated with law or legal studies as a result of European-rooted secular distinctions. These and other emerging fields offer sociolegal scholars a range of timely and often understudied avenues for future research that could potentially hold significance for broad readerships within and beyond anthropology and sociolegal studies.
LegalismRules, Categories, and Texts
Authors: Pirie Fernanda
Published: December 2020

Laws, rules, and texts, this chapter argues, deserve more sustained attention by legal anthropologists. They have tended to turn their backs on doctrine and texts, but law and legal phenomena have taken legalistic forms practically since the invention of writing. Historical and anthropological examples indicate that legalism – that is, the use of general rules and abstract categories – is typical of law as a social form. Paying attention to this aspect of law helps to explain legal phenomena that have long puzzled anthropologists, in particular, an enduring fascination with law, despite its repeated use to enact and legitimate power. A focus on legalism, moreover, allows scholars to compare diverse empirical examples from the rich corpus of historical legal studies with more contemporary ethnographic work in order to reflect upon the nature of law as a social form.
The Persistence of Chinese Rights Defenders
Authors: Davis Sara L. M.
Published: December 2020

Scholars have recently critiqued human rights as a purely Eurocentric construct that has failed to find wider appeal and is now on the decline. Some cite the apparent success of China’s repressive political regime in support of this argument, but depicting China as uniformly authoritarian risks missing the persistence of domestic forms of human rights advocacy and mobilization. This chapter reviews the history of civil society mobilization in China since 2000, including actions taken in domestic courts, in non-governmental organizations, and through social media. Despite repeated crackdowns, the arrest and disappearance of leading human rights defenders, and Chinese authorities’ interference with UN human rights mechanisms, some Chinese human rights defenders do find innovative ways to persist in rights-based advocacy, such as the practice of weiguan (public counterveillance during political trials). The author argues that the world has entered a more intense phase of struggle over the meaning and application of human rights norms in diverse local contexts, and that the human rights framework facilitates transnational solidarity.
Norm Creation beyond the State
Authors: Dann Philipp , Eckert Julia M.
Published: December 2020

The generation of law beyond the state is an unbroken dynamic. In international and transnational relations, the formulation and strategic use of rules through an increasing number of actors in diverse settings and across almost all fields of societal ordering provides a particularly fascinating and rich, but also contested field of inquiry for scholars of legal anthropology and law. We interrogate this dynamic of increasing deterritorialization of law production, which brings particular questions to the centre of our enquiries: Who are the actors involved in such norm creation? What are the conditions of participation in these norm-producing processes? How do such norms gain authority? To address these questions, we claim that the combination of anthropological and legal reservoirs of knowledge is particularly fruitful. What is more, we conclude that an important common task of anthropological and legal scholarship should be to ‘de-naturalize’ legal concepts and categories in order to make room for critical perspectives and interrogate, if not destabilize, structures of power and domination.
The Theory of International Business Strategy
Authors: Narula Rajneesh , Verbeke Alain , Yuan Wenlong
Published: December 2020

Is there a unifying theory of international business (IB) strategy? If so, what might it look like? This chapter describes the key ingredients of such theory. These ingredients, we propose, constitute the foundation for further analysis of IB strategy. We incorporate both the traditional ingredients of IB strategy perspectives and significant extensions to theory developed in the past two decades. The chapter highlights the importance of multinational enterprises (MNEs) engaging in resource recombination—as opposed to simply utilizing extant reservoirs of resource bundles and capabilities, also called firm-specific advantages (FSAs)—to manage their operations in complex and often highly dynamic home and host environments. The chapter zooms in on the role played by generic behavioral drivers, such as bounded rationality and bounded reliability. Generic behavioral challenges are present in most, if not all, IB strategy decisions. Finally, the significance of a unifying conceptual framework for better understanding MNE strategy is discussed.
Internationalization of Family Firms
Authors: Kano Liena , Verbeke Alain , Ciravegna Luciano
Published: December 2020

We infuse new internalization theory (NIT) with insights from family firm research, specifically, micro-foundational drivers of family managers’ decision-making such as socio-emotional wealth (SEW) preferences and bifurcation bias. We argue that the international governance of family firms is best explained through a model that combines efficiency-based logic (rooted in NIT) and affect-based logic (rooted in SEW). Such explanation expands the boundaries of NIT by addressing both international competitive success of family firms vis-à-vis their non-family counterparts and their divergence from efficient international governance and consequent failure in host markets. Disciplined pursuit of functional (as opposed to dysfunctional) aspects of SEW can facilitate the firm’s ability to economize on bounded rationality and reliability and create an environment conducive to value generation in host markets. However, unconstrained pursuit of SEW will lead to governance inefficiencies. Family firms can enhance the functional impact of SEW by implementing anticipative, large-scale strategies to economize on bifurcation bias. Ultimately, the main prediction of NIT holds—only efficient governance will be sustained in the long run.
Subsidiaries as Sources for Learning in Multinational Enterprises
Authors: Andersson Ulf , Forsgren Mats , Holm Ulf
Published: December 2020

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, Andersson, Forsgren, and Holm (2001, 2002) published two highly cited articles on the relationship between network embeddedness and the evolution of multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiary roles. These articles paved the way for research examining the importance of market knowledge acquired by an MNE subsidiary through being embedded in local networks, which would, in time, be expected to positively influence the competence development of other MNE units. The present chapter presents an overview of the key contributions of these seminal papers, followed by a discussion about the theoretical and empirical advancements concerning the relationship between embeddedness and subsidiary competence development. We provide suggestions around how to conceptualize competence development and knowledge transfer in relation to subsidiary external embeddedness and highlight areas where more research is needed.
Location and International Strategy Formation
Authors: Mudambi Ram
Published: December 2020

By now, it is generally accepted that the two key dimensions of international business (IB) strategy are location and control. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) must therefore decide where to locate their international operations and how to control their activities there. Virtually every research question associated with IB strategy is related to one or both of these dimensions. This chapter will focus on the location dimension, while recognizing that the control dimension is its ever-present complement. Historically, MNEs expanded into international locations in order to seek local, natural resources unavailable in their home countries. However, at present, it is the MNEs’ search for knowledge resources that dominates their location strategies. Over the last decade, the rise of global value chains (GVCs) has become one of the primary factors motivating scholars to integrate insights from IB and economic geography to develop a more holistic view of the location dimension of MNE strategy. We discuss the evolution of key intellectual ideas in the area of IB location strategies to then propose a future research agenda.
Funerary equipment
Authors: Dodson Aidan
Published: December 2020

While among the most iconic of all Egyptian antiquities, funerary equipment was subject to little substantive study until the 1970s. As a result there was limited understanding of the typology and chronology of even such ubiquitous objects as coffins, resulting in casual mis-datings of up to a millennium in some extreme cases. However, from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, a series of studies have greatly elucidated our knowledge of many of the key categories of funerary material, in particular as regards the detailed chronology of coffins. This has allowed such objects now to be properly assessed in their full historical and material cultural contexts.
The Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period
Authors: Strudwick Nigel
Published: December 2020

The Old Kingdom is usually characterized as the first great epoch of Egyptian history, when the phenomenal cultural, iconographical and political developments of the late Predynastic Period and the Early Dynastic Period coalesced to give an eminently visible culture that says ‘ancient Egypt’ to the modern audience. This development may best be symbolized by the pyramid, the most persistent image of the era. For its part, the First Intermediate Period is the first clear manifestation in Egyptian history of the periods of disunity and systemic weakness that have affected every long-lasting ancient and modern culture in one form or the other. The time-period covered in this section illustrates for the first time both the highs and lows of ancient Egypt. The Old Kingdom is usually defined as consisting of the Third to Eighth Dynasties of Manetho (c.2686–2125 bc), and the First Intermediate Period of the Ninth and Tenth and roughly two-thirds of the Eleventh Dynasty (c.2160–2016 bc).
Landscapes and environmental history of the Nile valley
Authors: Butzer Karl W.
Published: December 2020

The first part of this chapter focuses on the relationships between the Nile, the biophysical landscape, and methods of ancient Egyptian irrigation. The initial discussion concerns the likely nature of the primeval Nile landscape, and the use of Sub-saharan analogues, such as the Niger and Senegal rivers, as arguments for there having been a free-draining, convex Nile floodplain. There is also discussion of Alleaume’s study of basin-irrigation in the Nile, which has implications for contemporary research on the Egyptian landscape. The second half of the chapter examines historical perspectives on the ancient environment of northeast Africa, allowing the rich body of available data to be analysed objectively. The latter section includes a detailed case study on the geoarchaeology of the Giza region, and specifically the Old Kingdom settlement site of Heit el-Ghurab.
Genealogies
Authors: Bierbrier Morris L.
Published: December 2020

Genealogy played an important role in Ancient Egypt for religious, social, legal, and chronological reasons. Despite a paucity of words to describe relationships, the Egyptians sought to commemorate their family and ancestors in their tombs and on stelae and statuary. This desire not only includes royalty and official families, but is evident in non-elite contexts as evidenced at the tomb-builders settlement of Deir el-Medina and later Demotic contracts. The most detailed surviving genealogies come from the Late New Kingdom and can be used as checks on the chronology of the time.
Gods, mythology, and cosmology
Authors: Bickel Susanne
Published: December 2020

No ancient Egyptian treatise defines the essence of gods nor narrates the entirety of a myth. Information on the ancient Egyptian belief system and world view is contained in written and iconographic sources that were generally composed for cultic use in the temple or the funerary sphere. This article sketches the history of study of Egyptian religion, and summarizes definitions and forms of characterizations of deities, as well as the main mythological complexes within which the gods were set in interaction. It also addresses cosmology was a crucial issue of religious thinking and world explanation.
Symbolism and religious iconography
Authors: Wilkinson Richard
Published: December 2020

Symbolism formed the basis of most, if not all, religious iconography in ancient Egypt and was widely employed in the production of two- and three-dimensional works as well as in the design and orientation of religious and funerary monuments. The psychological and historical origins of Egyptian symbolism are only partly understood, but the scholarly awareness and study of the symbolic aspects found in Egyptian cultural remains has grown steadily over the last century. These studies now form a vital part of any thoroughgoing analysis of ancient Egyptian religious iconography.
Historical texts
Authors: Leprohon Ronald J.
Published: December 2020

Texts with information on the history of ancient Egypt take many forms. We find royal annals and king lists, as well as court-produced narratives that describe the king’s successes on the battlefield or his largess to divine temples. Private monuments also preserve historical facts, from accounts of a soldier’s prowess or of an official’s diligence in fulfilling the king’s wishes. This article presents a wide variety of texts, from graffiti to papyri and stelae to funerary chapels.
Socio-economic texts
Authors: Gee John
Published: December 2020

Socio-economic texts tend to be defined by not being literary or religious rather than what they are. They are written in all manner of scripts and on all sorts of materials. Their proper publication aids immensely in their study. Properly used they can shed a great deal of light on a wide range of matters about ancient Egyptian society as well as individuals and families. Controversies arising from socio-economic texts highlight the ambiguities in the material and the assumptions we make in using them.
Conservation in Egyptological museum collections
Authors: Schorsch Deborah
Published: December 2020

Conservators are professionals dedicated to the physical preservation of cultural heritage in varied contexts. In museums they work closely with curators and conservation scientists to maintain or improve the structural or chemical stability of works in their care. Prior to undertaking a treatment, conservators visually examine each artefact and use instrumental analytical methods to establish and document its manufacture and materials, the causes and extent of deterioration, and previous interventions, all of which can affect its physical condition and appearance. In addition to undertaking technical examinations and carrying out active treatment protocols, conservators institute preventive measures and best practice guidelines to control the museum environment and minimize damage during display, travel, and storage. Conservators of Egyptian antiquities face special challenges predicated by unique aspects of ancient Egypt’s physical and cultural landscape.
Egyptology in China
Authors: Xiaodong Li
Published: December 2020

Egyptology as a discipline developed very late in China, in the 1930s, and from this point onwards, the laying of the foundations of Egyptology took another three generations of effort. This late arrival of the discipline has made it difficult for Chinese scholars to make a great contribution to the development of Egyptology, especially since the history of Egyptology has an almost 200-year legacy in Europe and America. However, the Chinese perspective could help towards an understanding of ancient Egypt from a more global and comparative viewpoint. This chapter sets out a comparative study between the two great civilizations of China and Egypt as an important analytical method, focusing particularly on the comparison between the approaches the two writing systems followed when they invented their written characters, an aspect which reveals detailed ideas about ancient Egyptian culture and society.
Ethics
Authors: Phillips-Hutton Ariana , Nielsen Nanette
Published: December 2020

Despite its lengthy history and ongoing vitality, tracing the relationship between music and ethics as a distinct field remains challenging. This chapter offers an overview of several historical strands of thought on music and ethics before engaging in more depth with recent studies in both musicological and philosophical literatures. It seeks to develop a new model for thinking about the relationship between music and ethics, or what it calls a musical ethics. This consensual model considers the musical experience as relational and intuitive, and as an embodied and emergent social practice that highlights questions of (inter)subjectivity and agency. The chapter argues that thinking of musical ethics foregrounds the benefit of rigorous interdisciplinary consideration of music and ethics as an integrated field of inquiry and highlights the intertwining concerns as well as distinctive characteristics of the constituent parts of this field. It closes with an illustration of the musical ethics model via an analysis of singer-songwriter Imogen Heap’s 2005 hit song “Hide and Seek” before drawing out some of the implications of this work for future research.