bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Evolutionary Theory
Authors: Shaver John H. , Purzycki Benjamin Grant , Sosis Richard
Published: June 2017

People in all cultures entertain beliefs in supernatural agents and engage in ritual behaviors that are related to those beliefs. This suggests that religion is a product of a shared evolutionary history. Currently researchers employ three major evolutionary frameworks to study religion—evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, and dual-inheritance theory—each with different assumptions, methods, and areas of focus. This chapter surveys these approaches and describes the major sources of disagreement between them. Two of the largest sources of disagreement among evolutionary scholars of religion are: (1) whether or not religion is a cognitive byproduct, or a manifestation of adaptive behavioral plasticity, and (2) whether or not individual or group-level selection processes are a more potent evolutionary force in shaping the significant features religion. The authors suggest that integrative frameworks that incorporate aspects of all these perspectives offer the best potential for real progress.
The Emergence and Development of Intellectual Property Law in Western Europe
Authors: Seville Catherine
Published: June 2017

This chapter surveys the emergence and development of Intellectual Property (IP) law in Continental Europe and Britain. The story begins largely in the middle ages with the grant of territorially-confined inventors’ and printers’ privileges, and traces the development of these privileges into the four main species of IP rights recognized throughout the world today. A key theme is the varied national histories that underpin the development of each IP right even within the geographical confines and relative social and political homogeneity of Western Europe, and the extent of modern IP law’s embeddedness in the industrial and cultural development of individual states. The chapter ends with an account of the emergence of a European perspective on IP, as expressed in the nineteenth-century Paris and Berne Conventions, and its development by general and IP-specific European communities, including the EU, which has established unitary patent, trademark, and design rights for its Member States.
Design Protection
Authors: Beebe Barton
Published: June 2017

This chapter surveys the legal protection of industrial designs, understood as the protection of the appearance of articles of manufacture. It discusses the definition of “design” according to both the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). It examines the international instruments that form the foundation of industrial design law, including the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the Paris Convention, and the Berne Convention, among others. It then focuses on the various areas of intellectual property (IP) law that make up design law, including sui generis design protection law, patent law, copyright law, and trademark law among others, with particular attention on these aspects of design law as they feature in the US and the EU.
Trust
Authors: Gerbasi Alexandra , Cook Karen S.
Published: June 2017

This article examines the role of trust as a determinant of cooperative behavior in social relations and social organizations. It begins with an overview of some issues of definition, scope, and measurement of trust, followed by discussion of the dimensions of trust and trustworthiness. It then reviews some evidence on the role of trust in social relations and social organizations before analyzing the main and moderating effects of trust in the context of organizations. It also explores the macro-level consequences of trust for society as well as the negative impact of trust networks. Finally, it looks at a number of alternatives to trust and suggests directions for future research. The article argues that trust is only one mechanism by which we motivate cooperation and manage social order and that the role of trust in society has been radically oversold as a necessary and wholly positive force.
Conditional Choice
Authors: Moody James
Published: June 2017

This article examines the dynamics of conditional choice as a mechanism for explaining social action, with particular emphasis on identifying model frameworks for the analysis of the trajectory and outcome of conditional decision-making processes. It begins with an overview of conditional decision-making, including key words and concepts, followed by a discussion of conditional decision rules and initial states of activity and how they shape the basic trajectory and outcome of a conditional decision-making process. It then considers possible sources of resistance to influence, focusing on the ways unconditional actors pull all other group members towards their position and how individual variation in resistance to influence can stop a process from reaching complete conformity. It also explores patterns of social interaction and how they work in combination with resistance to influence to account for variation in activity among individuals or groups, paying attention to the contingent effect of local networks.
Threshold Models of Social Influence
Authors: Winship Christopher
Published: June 2017

This article explores threshold models of social influence, with a particular focus on the consequences of simple heuristics in the context of social influence on collective decision-making processes. It first provides an overview of social-influence and threshold models before discussing influence cascades on complete and random networks. It then considers cascades in networks that emphasize the importance of social groups in the formation of influence networks, namely random-group networks and generalized-affiliation networks. It also describes cascade-seeding strategies and demonstrates how the structure of influence networks shapes the roles of individual actors (prominent or not) in the generation of collective behavior, including wild cascades of influence.
Homophily and the Focused Organization of Ties
Authors: Lynn Freda , Podolny Joel
Published: June 2017

This article examines homophily — the tendencies for people with similar characteristics to interact with one another — and how social structure gives rise to network autocorrelation more than expected, while at the same time providing a balance against dynamics inducing pure segregation. The article begins with a discussion of two distinct processes by which network autocorrelation can arise from people acting consistently with homophily, their preferences to interact with people like themselves: they can change themselves or they can change their interaction partners. It then considers the social-structural infrastructure of conformity, with particular emphasis on the focused organization of social ties and the limited segmentation of focused organization. It also introduces a model to represent the triplexity of social structure comprised of people, foci, and traits. Finally, it analyzes heterogeneity within and among an individual’s foci of activity.
Status
Authors: Lindquist W. Brent , Chase Ivan
Published: June 2017

This article examines status dynamics, with particular emphasis on four common patterns. First, actors use others’ status as a signal of their underlying quality. Second, an actor’s status influences the rewards that he/she receives. Third, an individual’s status position is not fixed, but arises from the exchange relations between individuals. Fourth, actors are especially likely to rely on status queues to make inferences about quality when there is substantial uncertainty about that underlying quality. The article first considers the sociological conception of status as a signal before reviewing studies that demonstrate the broad applicability of the four propositions laid out above, taking into account the concept of Matthew effect. It then explores a new line of research on commensuration and value, suggesting that the presence of structural cues may lead to the depreciation of quality.
Surveys
Authors: Vaughan Diane
Published: June 2017

This article focuses on surveys and their potential as a research methodology in the field of analytical sociology. It presents arguments to show how analytical sociologists can take advantage of the widespread use of surveys in sociology. First, surveys provide social facts, or empirical regularities that analytical sociology aims to explain. Second, surveys can be and have been used to empirically study social mechanisms. Third, survey data are better suited than data collected by many other methods to the analysis, comparison, and simulation of macro effects or aggregation and are therefore critical for studying interdependent action. The article also considers how survey design can exploit the full potential for interaction-based explanations and discusses the problem of causal inference with observational data. It suggests that surveys can and do provide useful data when anchored appropriately in time and social space.
Analytic Ethnography
Authors: Barkey Karen
Published: June 2017

This article examines the unique contribution that analytic ethnography has made and can make to accomplishing two of the key principles of analytical sociology: developing theoretical explanations by identifying mechanisms that connect actors, action, and outcomes; bridging the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis in those explanations. It first distinguishes ‘analytic ethnography’ from other varieties of ethnography before showing how analytic ethnography has historically developed mechanism-based explanations that go beyond the micro level. It then compares analytic ethnography to analytical sociology in order to highlight the compatibility of the two. Finally, it demonstrates how theoretical integration can be achieved first within analytic ethnography, then between analytic ethnography and analytical sociology, using research on signaling and explanations of outcomes in which signals are the mechanism.
Opportunities
Authors: Petersen Trond
Published: June 2017

This article examines how the concept of opportunity is used in analyses of choices people make and in analyses of social inequality and civil rights. It first considers the distinction between choices made without attention to what other agents do versus choices made strategically taking into account the possible actions of others. It then explains how agents may act to shape the constraints and opportunities they face, as well as how available opportunities may shape preferences. These abstract ideas are applied to the substantive field of inequality, first in the context of civil-rights legislation and debates in theories of justice, and second in an analysis of differential labor market outcomes. More specifically, the article looks at career opportunities and opportunity hoarding in the professions. Finally, it evaluates opportunities for discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex in the current legal environment.
Heuristics
Authors: Goldstein Dan
Published: June 2017

This article examines the role of heuristics in driving social action, focusing on the simple heuristics that people use in their everyday lives: the Recognition Heuristic and the Take-the-best Heuristic. It first describes recognition-based inference and knowledge-based inference before discussing how fast-and-frugal heuristics are being employed as models of both individual and group decision-making. It then describes social heuristics, with particular emphasis on the role of recognition heuristic in groups, along with knowledge aggregation in groups. It also explores how cue orders are learned socially and provides examples of how simple heuristics might account for complex behavior, how they can serve as robust models, and how they can make counterintuitive predictions. The article concludes by identifying factors that determine whether a heuristic will be successful as well as the conditions that give rise to actors’ switching heuristics.
Norms
Authors: Elster Jon
Published: June 2017

This article explores the relationship between norms and action, making a distinction between social and moral norms, quasi-moral norms, legal norms, and conventions. It defines ‘social norm’ as a non-outcome-oriented injunction to act or to abstain from acting, sustained by the sanctions that others apply to norm violators. After explaining how social norms operate, the article considers some important or representative social norms, including work norms, tipping norms, queueing norms, fairness norms and political norms. It also compares social norms with other motivations to act and argues that social norms are ultimately sustained by the emotions of contempt (or indignation) and shame. Yet the influence of emotion on behavior is much larger than the impact mediated by social norms.
The Role of Moral Beliefs, Shame, and Guilt in Criminal Decision Making
Authors: Svensson Robert , Pauwels Lieven J. R. , Weerman Frank M.
Published: June 2017

Morality, and particularly the capacity to experience shame and/or guilt, may be viewed as sediments of early experiences with the commitment of acts of crime and rule-breaking and the consequences of these acts. This chapter addresses the specific roles of moral beliefs and moral emotions such as shame and guilt and how they are related to criminal decisions. It presents an overview of relevant theoretical frameworks that explain why and how moral beliefs and moral emotions affect criminal decision making. The focus of this chapter is particularly on anticipations of shame and guilt, two powerful and painful emotions that humans naturally want to avoid. In addition, findings from empirical studies are reviewed, and implications for criminological theory and prevention are addressed.
The Effect of Alcohol and Arousal on Criminal Decision Making
Authors: Exum M. Lyn , Austin Lauren A. , Franklin Justin D.
Published: June 2017

Consequentialist theories of criminal decision making assume crime is a choice that one undertakes if the perceived benefits of the act outweigh its costs. This a priori assessment of costs and benefits involves the use of several neurological components, including the amygdala–striatal system and the prefrontal cortex. Crime is commonly committed by individuals under the influence of alcohol and/or experiencing heightened states of emotional arousal. Both alcohol and arousal impact neurological functioning, including that of the amygdala–striatal system and prefrontal cortex. This chapter examines the influence of alcohol and arousal on criminal decision making from a neuroeconomic perspective. It discusses the neurological effects that alcohol and arousal may have on the identification and evaluation of criminal consequences. These effects bound one’s rationality and increase the likelihood of criminal/aggressive behavior. Empirical research on alcohol, arousal, and criminal decision making is summarized, and suggestions for future research are presented.
Emotions in Offender Decision Making
Authors: van Gelder Jean-Louis
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the influence of emotions on offender decision making. It reviews the empirical and theoretical criminological literature on the role of emotions in crime causation but also draws from other disciplines in the behavioral and cognitive sciences that have examined the influence of emotions on human decision making. Specific attention is devoted to appraisal theories of emotion, which, it is argued, provide a useful theoretical framework for studying and understanding emotions in criminal contexts. In doing so, it is shown that criminal decision-making research and theorizing may have so far failed to fully acknowledge the influence of emotions on offending behavior.
Evolutionary Approaches to Rational Choice
Authors: Ekblom Paul
Published: June 2017

This chapter seeks to enrich and extend thinking about the rational choice perspective to offender decision making and its pivotal application in situational crime prevention by taking an evolutionary approach, which is still uncommon in crime science and criminology. The chapter introduces basic concepts of evolution, covering the brain and behavior, levels and types of explanation, the strained relationship with social science, and the evidencing of evolutionary processes. The focus then shifts to rationality, covering decision making; the wider suite of processes needed to understand rationality in action; and specific discussions of cooperation, humans’ wider “sociocognitive niche,” and development. Although evolutionary issues are addressed throughout, the penultimate section discusses how rationality in the broadest sense has unfolded over evolutionary history and the significant connection between maximization of utility in contemporary rational choice and maximization/optimization of fitness in evolution. The conclusion raises practical, empirical, and theoretical questions for crime science.
Co-offending and Co-offender Selection
Authors: van Mastrigt Sarah B.
Published: June 2017

A notable proportion of crime is committed in company, particularly during youth, but relatively little attention has been paid to the influence of co-offenders on criminal decision making. This chapter reviews current theory and research on co-offending as it relates to three aspects of offender decision making: the decision to (co)-offend, the selection of accomplices, and choices shaping the characteristics of the criminal event (planning, target selection, and seriousness). Both implicit and explicit decision making are considered, as well as situations in which the offense is premeditated and collaboration is explicitly sought after a plan has been made and situations in which the motivation to offend develops in a group of preformed individuals who become co-offenders by committing the act. The chapter concludes with a discussion of gaps in the current evidence base and directions for future research.
Experimental Designs in the Study of Offender Decision Making
Authors: Bouffard Jeffrey A. , Niebuhr Nicole
Published: June 2017

Research on offender decision making has utilized experimental designs and has often coupled these strong designs with the use of hypothetical vignettes that describe specific offending circumstances for the would-be offender to consider. In some cases, these studies have experimentally manipulated situational elements of the imagined setting. In others, researchers have experimentally manipulated the context in which the participants make the decision. Other researchers have utilized randomized designs with behavioral analogues within the research setting. This research has found that various situational and individual-level factors influence the content and process of offender decision making in important ways. Future research should further explore how offenders form risk perceptions and how these influences may interact with one another, and it should continue to refine these methods to more closely approximate real-world settings.
Multiple Interpretations of Rationality in Offender Decision Making
Authors: Elffers Henk
Published: June 2017

It is argued that, contrary to some criticisms, rational choice theory of criminal decision making has and should have a clear place for emotions as part of the decision-making process, as it had in classical treatises of Coornhert, Smith, and Bentham, as well as in modern formulations such as Elster’s. It appears that much disagreement is a consequence of a hidden difference of opinion on what the concept of “rational choice” contains or should contain and how it may or may not be used in explaining the occurrence of crime. This chapter provides clarity on this issue by discussing various elements that may have generated disagreement about content and scope of the rational choice approach. The chapter focuses on what is, could, or should be the contribution of rational choice theory to criminal choice theory.
Organized Crime and Protection Rackets
Authors: Campana Paolo
Published: June 2017

By relying on a broad rational choice perspective, this chapter explores the key mechanisms underpinning the workings of organized crime and specifically protection rackets. It first defines organized crime in terms of its attempt to monopolize markets, and then the chapter explores the factors that may lead to the emergence of criminal monopolies. Next, it discusses some distinctive features associated with protection rackets, with a focus on the nature of protection, its varieties and price. The chapter then discusses some of the challenges faced by illegal protectors. Finally, it critically assesses the interplay between globalization and organized crime and reviews a new framework for interpreting transnational organized crime operations.
Introduction
Authors: Moyar Dean
Published: June 2017

This Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Hegel briefly discusses the layout of the Handbook, sketches the most important debates within the current scholarship, and fills in some of the main omissions from the Handbook. The debate over the metaphysical character of Hegel’s system is introduced, with overviews of the Kantian, Spinozist and Aristotelian readings of Hegel’s metaphysics. Hegel’s theory of action and his theory of mutual recognition are also discussed. The second section presents Hegel’s early biography and development up to the point at which Hegel arrived in Jena and connects that early development to Hegel’s mature thought. The concluding section gives the outlines of two essential episodes in the story of Hegel’s reception – the ‘young Hegelians’ and ‘British Idealists.’
The Logic of Essence as Internal Reflection
Authors: Quante Michael
Published: June 2017

The grammar of subjectivity, in particular in the form of self-consciousness, belongs to this day to the most difficult objects of philosophy. This holds in the philosophy of German idealism as well as in analytic philosophy. This grammar supplies the basic structure of all fundamental epistemological conceptions and is itself the object of various ontological interpretations. Hegel’s analysis of essence as internal reflection, which is analyzed in detail in this chapter, is one of the most rigorous analyses of this grammar of subjectivity. His conception has two main strengths: first, the approach operates at such a fundamental level that the distinction between the epistemological and the ontological dimension is itself conceived as an element of this grammar. Second, Hegel succeeds in unfolding the complexity of this grammar out of a single principle by means of a self-referential movement of the concept.
From Actuality to Concept in Hegel’s Logic
Authors: Ng Karen
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines Hegel’s treatment of the concept of actuality in his Science of Logic. It argues that Hegel’s treatment of actuality serves two functions: first, it provides the argument for the ‘genesis of the Concept’, Hegel’s version of Kant’s transcendental deduction; second, it allows Hegel to determine a specific type of activity characteristic of both life and freedom. The key to understanding the transition from actuality to the Concept (der Begriff) lies in Hegel’s concept of reciprocity (Wechselwirkung), a reciprocal relation between cause and effect that constitutes an inner purposiveness of form. The author develops this argument by examining the key moves of the three chapters that close out the Objective Logic—“The Absolute,” “Actuality,” and “The Absolute Relation”—taking up Hegel’s relation to Aristotle and Spinoza, his treatment of the modal categories, and his critique of mechanistic accounts of causality.
Hegel’s First System Program and the Task of Philosophy
Authors: Sandkaulen Birgit
Published: June 2017

Until 1800, Hegel held that religion takes primacy over philosophy. That commitment alters fundamentally with his first publications in Jena. The Difference essay (1801) and Faith and Knowledge (1802) hold the key to the genesis of his mature thought. Chapter 1 focuses on Hegel’s efforts to define the task of philosophy and thereby to shore up his new position. Hegel’s first system program, dedicated to a holistic conception of reality, is shaped by his understanding of three central concepts: the absolute, speculation, and the system. Here the influence of Jacobi and Spinoza is formative. Critical analysis of his reception of their thought illuminates the epistemological problems Hegel was still facing in Jena and reveals the abiding convictions that will henceforth guide him. The system program of the Difference essay thus both sets the agenda and forms the template for the famous Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel’s Psychology
Authors: Ikaheimo Heikki
Published: June 2017

This chapter aims to show that in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Hegel develops a thoroughly ‘detranscendentalized’ account of the human person as the ‘concrete’ flesh-and-blood subject of knowledge and action, an account that deserves much more attention than it has received. Reconstructing Hegel’s holistic picture of the human person as the ‘concrete subject’ of knowing and acting requires a proper understanding of the structure of the text, which on a simple linear reading appears fragmentary and confusing. This chapter focuses on the Psychology section, and the thematically closely connected Phenomenology section. It first reconstructs the ‘parallel architectonics’ of the Phenomenology and Psychology, the understanding of which is essential for comprehending the substantial views Hegel puts forth in them. It then draws on this reconstruction and introduces central elements of Hegel’s account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action as it unfolds in the text.
Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy
Authors: de Boer Karin
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines Hegel’s lectures on the history of modern philosophy in view of the tension between, on the one hand, his ambition to grasp philosophy’s past in a truly philosophical way and, on the other hand, the necessity to account for the actual particularities of a wide range of philosophical systems. Hegel’s lectures are put in relief by comparing their methodological principles to those put forward by his Kantian predecessor Tennemann. After discussing Hegel’s conception of modern philosophy as a whole, the chapter turns to his reading of Locke, Leibniz, and, in particular, Kant. In this context, it also compares Hegel’s assessment of Kant’s achievements to that of Tennemann. The chapter concludes by considering Hegel’s account of the final moment of the history of philosophy.
The American Reception of Hegel (1830–1930)
Authors: Kaag John , Jensen Kipton E.
Published: June 2017

This chapter outlines the reception of Hegel in the United States in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Hegel dramatically influenced the formation of American transcendentalism and American pragmatism, despite often being described as simply antithetical to these American philosophies. While pragmatists such as Peirce and James often criticized a certain interoperation of Hegel, their readings of the Phenomenology and Logic helped them articulate a philosophy, inherited from Emerson, that was geared toward experience and to exploring the practical, deeply human, effects of philosophy. Care is taken to describe the impact that the study of Hegel had on American institutions of culture and politics in the nineteenth century.
Curiosity and Interest
Authors: Silvia Paul J. , Kashdan Todd B.
Published: June 2017

Recent years have seen renewed attention to curiosity and interest―recognizing, seeking out, and preferring things that are outside of one’s normal experience. In this chapter, we explore curiosity, where it fits in the larger scheme of positive emotions, how individual differences are assessed, the advantages of being curious in social relationships, links between curiosity and elements of well-being, and how it has been used in interventions to improve people’s quality of life. Our review emphasizes findings that show how curiosity operates in the laboratory and everyday life, and how, under certain conditions, curiosity can be a profound source of strength, or a liability. People who are regularly curious and willing to embrace the novelty, uncertainty, and challenges that are inevitable in everyday life have an advantage in creating a fulfilling existence compared with their less curious peers. Our review is designed to bring further attention to this underappreciated human universal.
Who is theory for?
Authors: Kaeser Marc-Antoine
Published: June 2017

Theory holds a paradoxical position in archaeology: its symbolic prestige is restricted to academic circles, and contrasts with the poor influence it exerts upon the daily practice of archaeology. This problem relates to the lack of a solid body of doctrines, but also to the methodological blurredness and disciplinary unsteadiness of archaeology. Past ideological abuses of interpretative models, as well as the tangible materiality of the archaeological sources have often encouraged demagogic, positivist attitudes among researchers, where down-to-earth explanations become evidence that discredit the need for theory in archaeology. We use a very broad definition of “theory”, encompassing the epistemology and the historiographic analysis of archaeological research: theory deals with everything that is linked to the nature of archaeology, to its scientific approaches, and to its relationship to the past and present. Functioning as a guide to archaeological practice, theory can therefore not be the field of specialists only.
Bilateral Dialogues
Authors: Faber Eva-Maria
Published: June 2017

The chapter traces the history of bilateral dialogues and considers the experience and results of dialogue. It discusses the particular nature of bilateral dialogues in contrast with multilateral ecumenism, and the goals of such dialogue, which take different forms, e.g. identifying differences and achieving agreements, removing mistrust and beginning a mutual acquaintance, and the ‘reconciliation of memories’, depending on the partners involved. Attention is given to various problems of bilateral dialogues, for example, their correspondence with the actual reality of the churches involved, the coherence between multiple dialogues in which a given church may be involved, the reception of their results, and their effectiveness in changing perspectives. Reception is required not just at the level of church leadership, but also in the everyday lives of the churches, where bilateral dialogues are nowadays often perceived as being far removed from the life of local congregations.
Interchurch Families
Authors: Reardon Ruth
Published: June 2017

In interchurch families, both partners are practising members of their respective churches but wish also to participate in their spouse’s church as far as possible. Can such families really be ecumenical instruments, when they are so different from the organs of dialogue generally established by the churches? Interchurch couples themselves, united in an international network of groups and associations, believe that they can contribute to the growing unity between their churches. The Roman Catholic Church in particular has developed a more positive attitude towards the ecumenical potential of such families since Vatican II. Interchurch families contribute to Christian unity by their very existence as ‘domestic churches’, embodying and signifying the growing unity of the Church. The chapter concludes by suggesting how, with greater pastoral understanding and a deeper appreciation of the relationship between marital spirituality and spiritual ecumenism, they can become more effective ecumenical instruments by their characteristic ‘double belonging’.
Occasion
Authors: Trudell Scott A.
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the volatility of occasional entertainments in space and time as a reflection of how adaptable the conventions of early modern theatre could be. It considers how occasional entertainments, fully interactive with the richly physical and symbolic ecologies around them, reveal the role of a fixed stage in the design and procurement of early modern theatricality. It shows that poetic verse was a relatively insignificant element in the entertainments, pageants, and Lord Mayors shows of the period and explains how print became a way to transform the contingencies of occasion into an enduring ‘poesy’: in print, the noise, rain, mud, crowds, bored monarchs, tired children, and sheer formal incoherence of the event all resolved into a grand and silent art.
Indecorum
Authors: Mackay Ellen
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the ways in which the traffic between life and stage is always governed by a set of social, ethical, and interpretive norms, the violation of which threatens to humiliate (at best) or physically harm (at worst) the spectator. More specifically, it considers the problem of epistemological decorum in early modern theatre and describes the figure of the female playgoer as a model for indecorous participation, one that knowingly exploits the tensions between actuality and theatricality in order to sustain the play while also revealing its dependence upon the absorption and judgement of audiences. The chapter first provides an overview of the social logic of decorum in early modern England before turning to the perceptual contract that makes theatrical fiction possible. It argues that such a contract must be upheld by spectators in so many different ways at once—imaginatively, affectively, ethically—that it may dissolve at any moment; indeed, any act of theatre worth the same will always seek deliberately to push this contract to its limit.
Desire
Authors: Menon Madhavi
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines how we see desire on stage, especially in the absence of a body, through an analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Focusing on the absence of the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it considers whether desire can be present without a physicality to guarantee its presence on stage. It asks why Shakespeare does not produce the Indian boy as a fully materialized physical body and looks at two different modes of theatricality operating around the changeling boy’s physically absent body: the first might be hypothetically attributed to ‘Shakespeare’ and the second to ‘later productions’. It shows that the absent cause of desire and the inability to correlate desire to a fixed body seems to be a hallmark specifically of Shakespearean theatricality.
Formaction
Authors: Palfrey Simon
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines formactions—the working parts and craft materials of playworlds—that are often simultaneous, clustered, overlapping, and invisible and do not simply mediate or re-present things in the world, but are themselves vitally immanent with possible life. It argues that ‘theatricality’ describes not a technology of mimesis or even a kind of enacted philosophy, but rather a kind of physics: a world in which bodies, ideas, affects, and figures combine and recombine to generate the plays we watch, read, react to, and think about today. It highlights the value of the category of ‘form’ and uses it to address some of the major methodological problems associated with early modern theatre, including the problem of the ontology of theatre and its creations. It considers the metaphysics of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with particular emphasis on his philosophy of monads, to think about theatrical life.
Stage
Authors: Weigert Laura
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines transitions in theatrical representation from the multiple presentation areas of the medieval pageants to the fixed stage of the Renaissance period designated for the performance of plays that we associate with the early modern theatre. It also considers some of the performative conventions that persisted, including the use of statues, paintings, and fabric to personify ideas, along with the more conventional body of the actor. By focusing on foundational images pertaining to the history of the European stage, the chapter offers a glimpse into the nature of early modern ‘theatricality’: the practices, representational strategies, and organizing principles that defined dramatic performance from the late fourteenth through to the sixteenth centuries.
Duel
Authors: Kottman Paul A.
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines what it calls ‘philosophical dramaturgy’—a challenge to theatricality that comes from a powerful philosophical appropriation of drama—and its claim that drama, as a mode of human self-understanding, can and does free itself from needing re-enactment or sensuous expression in order to present an understanding of human agency, historical existence, and inter-personal dynamics. The chapter first considers a few aspects of the philosophical accounts of drama of Aristotle and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel before discussing an instance of ‘philosophical dramaturgy’ in modern philosophy: the presentation of the life-and-death struggle (or ‘duel’) in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It then looks at William Shakespeare’s response to philosophical dramaturgy and shows how he presents us with a kind of infinite theatricality that is no less philosophical but that differs absolutely in its mode.
Mobility
Authors: Bosman Anston
Published: June 2017

This article discusses three primary modes of ‘mobility’ in early modern theatre: geographical mobility from place to place, by both actors and scripts; a formal mobility among different modes of presentation and representation, including acting styles, characterization, and other embedded techniques of performance; and an ontological mobility that put into question the very notion of identity itself. The chapter considers itinerancy as the norm for acting companies during the period, both within and outside England, with the actors carrying with them a theatrical art that depended on many different modes of translation and cultural adaptation as they moved—over borders and among languages, across the boards and into the characters and plays of any given repertory. It examines the passport as a script for theatrical mobility and the outermost movement described by it—the travels of acting troupes across regions, countries, and continents.
Source
Authors: Guy-Bray Stephen
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the use of a variety of sources by English playwrights during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including historical chronicles, English and classical poetry, Italian novelle, and books and pamphlets about current events. More specifically, it considers the question of what playwrights thought they were doing when they adapted the texts of classical poetry to a new theatrical medium, which even they understood to be a mode of representation with lower prestige. It highlights moments of ‘meta-adaptation’ and discusses three plays in which both the process of adaptation and the question of the relation between dramatic and non-dramatic literature figure prominently: Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage; Ben Jonson’s Poetaster; and William Shakespeare and George Wilkins’s Pericles.
Intertheatricality
Authors: West William N.
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines intertheatricality in early modern drama and particularly the ways that intertheatrical moments reveal how a present mode of playing distinguishes itself from modes that precede it, but which it also preserves as a resource. Playgoing, it argues, implied the ability to pick out many different types of theatrical elements, at many different scales; what appears to us as a textual crux or lacuna may signify an especially dense point on a system of intertheatrical references that has been lost. Through an analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the chapter considers a shift from a notion of allusion—which produces complexity of meaning by juxtaposing two or more texts—to a notion of the analogue as a resource of theatrical possibility, familiarity, and difference. It shows that the formal elements in circulation discerned by intertheatricality appear not only as forms, but also as themes of theatrical performance.
Economics of Remedies
Authors: Porat Ariel
Published: June 2017

Remedies in different legal fields have much in common, and the study of remedies can teach us a lot, especially when the goals of the substantive legal fields are similar. Consider tort law and contract law. Under its efficiency rationale, tort law should minimize social costs, thereby enhancing social welfare. In order to achieve this goal, tort law should provide incentives for both the injurer and the victim to take efficient precautions. Similarly, contract law should also provide the parties with efficient incentives, in order to enable them to maximize the contractual surplus. In both torts and contracts, providing the injurer/promisor and the victim/promisee with efficient incentives is done through a combination of substantive and remedial law. Thus, both legal fields share much in common and often are adapted to the legal context to which they apply. The chapter emphasizes the common denominators of the remedies in torts and contracts.
Open-Access and Information Commons
Authors: Benkler Yochai
Published: June 2017

Open access commons are a family of institutional arrangements that are far more pervasive in modern complex economies than usually recognized in the economic literature. The defining characteristic of open access commons is their utilization of symmetric use privileges for an open, undefined set of users in the public, rather than asymmetric exclusive control rights located in the hands of an individual legal entity or defined group (club) use, and their primary reliance on queuing and some form of governance-based allocation, rather than price-cleared models, for congestion clearance and management. The chapter includes an overview of the commons literature, thumbnail case studies of the emergence of open access commons in the digitally networked environment, and a typology of open access commons and their proprietary parallels. The emergence of open access commons reflects the combined effect of innovation economics under highly uncertain conditions and the diversity of human motivations.
The Economic Nature of the Corporation
Authors: Stout Lynn
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the nature and structure of corporate entities (a category that includes business corporations, nonprofits, and many limited-liability companies). It discusses the basic characteristics of corporate entities, surveys different models or theories of the corporation, and explores the question of corporate purpose. It pays special attention to how corporate law allocates economic and control rights to, and among, both the corporate entity itself and the natural persons involved with corporations, such as shareholders, directors, and executive officers. The chapter finds that there is widespread agreement about the basic legal characteristics of corporate entities: legal personhood, limited liability, delegated management, transferable shares (for stock corporations), and perpetual existence. However, when it comes to models of the corporate entity and to the normative question of proper corporate purpose, there is great diversity and a fair degree of disagreement.
Recovery from transgenerational RNA silencing is driven by gene-specific homeostasis
Authors: Devanapally Sindhuja , Raman Pravrutha , Allgood Samual , Ettefa Farida , Diop Maigane , Chey Mary , Lin Yixin , Cho Yongyi E , Yin Rui , Jose Antony M
Published: June 2017

Changes in gene expression that last for multiple generations without changes in gene sequence have been reported in many plants and animals1–3. Cases of such transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (TEI) could support the ancestral origins of some diseases and drive evolutionary novelty. Here, we report that stably expressed sequences inC. eleganshave features that provide a barrier against TEI. By using double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) targeting the same sequence in different genes, we show that genes typically recover from silencing within the germline in a few generations. A rare recombinant two-gene operon containing this target sequence that recovered poorly from induced silencing enabled us to delineate mechanisms that can perpetuate silencing. Parental exposure to dsRNA targeting one gene within this operon reveals two distinct phases of the resulting TEI: only the matching gene is silenced in early generations, but both can become silenced in later generations. However, silencing of both genes can be initiated within one generation by mating, which perturbs intergenerational RNA-based mechanisms such that silencing dominates for more than 250 generations. This stable RNA silencing can also reduce the expression of homologous sequences in different genesin transwithin the germline, but the homologous genes recover expression after a few generations. These results suggest that stably expressed sequences are subject to feedback control that opposes TEI initiated by multiple mechanisms within the germline. We speculate that similar homeostatic mechanisms that enable recovery from epigenetic changes underlie the observed preservation of form and function in successive generations of living systems.
Coupling effect of morphology and mechanical properties contributes to the tribological behaviors of snake scales
Authors: Zheng Long , Zhong Yinghui , Gao Yihang , Li Jiayi , Zhang Zhihui , Liu Zhenning , Ren Luquan
Published: June 2017

It is known that the tribological behaviors of snake skins are contributed by the synergistic action of multiple factors, such as surface morphology and mechanical properties, which has inspired fabrication of scale-like surface textures in recent years. However, the coupling effect and mechanism remain to be elucidated. In this work, the morphology and mechanical properties of the scales from different body sections (leading body half, middle trunk and trailing body half) and positions (dorsal, lateral and ventral) ofBoa constrictorandEryx tataricushave been characterized and compared to investigate the corresponding effects on the tribological behaviors and to probe the possible coupling mechanism. The morphological characterizations of scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy have revealed significant differences between the two species with the roughness of scales fromBoa constrictorbeing larger in general. The mechanical properties measured by nanoindentation have corroboratively demonstrated substantial differences in terms of elastic modulus and hardness. Meanwhile, tribological characterizations of scales in different body positions from the two species also exhibit evident anisotropy. Interestingly, the ventral scales manifest higher friction coefficients but lower surface roughness, together with relatively larger elastic modulus and hardness. A “double-crossed” hypothesis has been proposed to explain the observed coupling effect of the morphology and mechanical properties on friction, which may afford valuable insights for the design of materials with desirable tribological performance.