bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Globalization and Comparative Law
Authors: Watt Horatia Muir
Published: February 2013

If comparative legal studies are to retain their relevance in understanding the impact of global changes on existing local traditions, their modes of interaction and influence, and their strategies for survival, then, the article concludes, their focus certainly needs adjusting. This article attempts to examine the ways in which comparative law as a discipline is affected by the changes wrought by globalization, and in particular the challenges which such changes imply for the methodological agenda of comparative legal studies and for its ideological commitments. More pragmatically, it may also be useful to envisage the impact of increased access to information on foreign laws, and the growth of trans- or international sources of uniform law, on the practical usefulness of comparative law.
Comparative Law and Language
Authors: Curran Vivian Grosswald
Published: February 2013

The second section of this article suggests that the study of language is a cognitive model for comparative law. The third section discusses language's dependence on translation. The fourth section discusses comparative law translations in terms of the contrasting categories that undergird the civil and common law legal systems. The fifth section examines the post-war comparative law scholars' immersion in a new language and legal culture. The sixth section situates comparative law between deeply entrenched, mutually contradictory aspirations of universalism and pluralism. The seventh section shows that former domains of pluralism and difference indeed are receding, but that difference itself remains undiminished. The eighth section notes that comparative law's effectiveness as a translator of the foreign depends on how well its acquired skills and methods can be adapted to new kinds of foreignness. The ninth section offers a concrete application of comparative law analysis as translator of current European legal developments.
Optimizing physical and psychological health in performing musicians
Authors: Kenny Dianna T.
Published: February 2013

Performing musicians face a number of physical, social, and psychological challenges that must be mastered if their musical career is to be both rewarding and sustainable. However, musicians are at high risk of physical and psychological strain and injury in the execution of their art. Physical and psychological stressors exert reciprocal and synergistic effects on the musician, and careful analysis of the intrinsic characteristics of the performer and the extrinsic demands on the musician must be made in order to develop appropriate interventions. This article provides an overview of the risks and challenges facing musicians, with the aim of developing awareness and understanding of how to prevent and manage these challenges. It is divided into two sections: physical challenges and psychological challenges, focusing on music-performance anxiety. Each section outlines the key issues and then provides an overview of evidence-based treatment.
Music therapy in medical and neurological rehabilitation settings
Authors: Leins Anne Kathrin , Spintge Ralph
Published: February 2013

This article discusses music therapy in medical and neurological rehabilitation settings. Neurologic music therapy encompasses evidence-based methods of the functional application of music in the rehabilitation of neurologic disorders. One of the most widely implemented clinical areas is its application in sensorimotor therapy, focusing on gait training. Music therapy is also widely applied in pain therapy. Meta-analyses underline the effectiveness of music therapy in acute pain of adult pain patients. Research focuses on clinical outcome, but also investigates possible underlying mechanisms such as the psychophysiological effects of music.
Chinese students' motivation and achievement
Authors: Hau Kit-Tai , Ho Irene T.
Published: February 2013

This article reviews recent evidences about Chinese students' outstanding academic performance and discusses the major themes and issues arising from the study of their motivational characteristics. Despite Chinese students' high academic achievement, research has shown that they actually display a generally lower sense of efficacy than their Western counterparts. As this article explains, there are at least two ways in which Chinese students differ from their Western counterparts in relation to competence beliefs. Firstly, with academic success being emphasized as a fulfilment of one's duty and achieved through effort, these success experiences may not be as significant a source of self-efficacy as in the Western context. Secondly, the importance of self-efficacy may not be as prominent in producing achievement behaviour as in the West, since there is no demonstrated relationship between their sense of efficacy and effort expenditure.
The multiple frames of ‘Chinese’ values: from tradition to modernity and beyond
Authors: Kulich Steve J. , Zhang Rui
Published: February 2013

Fascination with noting the uniqueness of ‘the Chinese’ and their culture has been an enduring pursuit of many throughout recent history. The psychological study of Chinese values has a long history, from Chinese being included in small-set multi-nation comparative studies, to deeper considerations of ‘the Chinese’ from indigenous and emic perspectives, to seeking to integrate Chinese values into universal etic frameworks. This article aims to position the study of ‘Chinese values’ in the context of the ongoing waves of global values studies to study and assess its contribution, and to bring into print an extensive summary of the vast new developments in values research on the Chinese mainland. It briefly reviews the academic history of values studies, where the definitions, levels, and frames of values are explained. Furthermore, it analyzes the approaches of more recent values research considering the varied assumptions about ‘Chinese values’ in their international context.
The Tao (way) of Chinese coping
Authors: Cheng Cecilia , Lo Barbara C. Y. , Chio Jasmine H. M.
Published: February 2013

In a multiple-country survey on perceived stress among entrepreneurs, Taiwan entrepreneurs were ranked top of the list. Over 60% of the Taiwan participants reported that they have experienced an increased amount of stress over the past year. Entrepreneurs from Hong Kong came second. Although they are on top of the stress rankings, this does not necessarily mean that the Chinese are in danger of psychological problems. This article seeks to explore the unique Chinese ways of coping with stressors. It points out that an extensive review of the literature has revealed that the Chinese are characterized by a greater tendency to use avoidant or emotion-focused coping, greater flexibility in strategy deployment across stressful situations, and a propensity to seek and utilize less social support. This article discusses each of these coping characteristics in the light of traditional cultural beliefs and contemporary cultural theories of psychology.
Dependency Grammar and Valency Theory
Authors: Ágel Vilmos , Fischer Klaus
Published: February 2013

This chapter introduces dependency grammar (DG) and valency theory (VT) by first presenting the syntactic theory of Lucien Tesnière, and then providing an overview of the development, current state, and possible concerns for both.
Grammaticalization and Linguistic Analysis
Authors: Heine Bernd , Narrog Heiko
Published: February 2013

Grammaticalization can be understood as a process by which grammar is created; more narrowly, it is defined as the development from lexical to grammatical forms, and from grammatical to even more grammatical forms. This chapter shows that the main goal of grammaticalization theory is to understand why grammar in general and functional categories in particular is structured the way it is. Typological generalizations on grammatical change provide a relevant tool for explaining structural properties of grammatical categories.
Linguistic Minimalism
Authors: Boeckx Cedric
Published: February 2013

Linguistic minimalism refers to a family of approaches exploring a conjecture, first formulated by Noam Chomsky in the early 1990s, concerning the nature of the human language faculty. This chapter first states what the conjecture amounts to, what sort of research programme emerges from it, and how it could be carried out. Second, it emphasizes that the minimalist program for linguistic theory did not arise out of nowhere, but is firmly grounded in the generative enterprise and the rationalist (‘Cartesian’) tradition more generally. Third, the pursuit of specific minimalist analyses follows a certain research style, often called the ‘Galilean style’, whose core properties are discussed here. Fourth, the chapter highlights the fact that minimalism, if rigorously pursued, naturally gives rise to a specific way of approaching interdisciplinary problems such as ‘Darwin's Problem’ (the logical problem of language evolution).
Morphological Analysis
Authors: Booij Geert E.
Published: February 2013

This chapter begins with an introduction to morphological analysis. It then discusses the following: word formation, the lexicon, inflection, interfaces, morphological classification, affix ordering, diachrony, processing complex words, morphological productivity, and tools for morphological research.
Optimality Theory in Phonology
Authors: Gouskova Maria
Published: February 2013

This chapter presents an overview of Optimality Theory (OT) as applied to phonology. OT is a theory of constraint interaction in grammar, which aims to solve a couple of problems that have confronted generative phonological theory since its earliest days. The first problem is conspiracies: in some languages, there is a constraint that seems to be satisfied in a variety of ways, as if the rules conspire to achieve a single target. The second problem is soft universals: unrelated languages show evidence of the same or similar constraints, but the constraints do not seem to hold in all languages. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 21.2 describes the architecture of OT, including its basic components and approach to typology. Section 21.3 addresses the status of the lexicon in OT. Section 21.4 and 21.5 describe some work on learnability, acquisition, and variation, and Section 21.6 concludes.
Role and Reference Grammar as a Framework for Linguistic Analysis
Authors: Van Valin Robert D.
Published: February 2013

Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) was inspired by both typological and theoretical concerns. The motivating questions for it were: What would a linguistic theory look like if it were based on the analysis of languages with diverse structures, such as Lakhota, Tagalog, Dyirbal, and Barai, rather than the analysis of English? How can the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in different grammatical systems be best captured and explained? This chapter is organized as follows. Section 28.2 discusses the organization of RRG. Section 28.3 describes the linking between syntax and semantics. Section 28.4 provides a brief summary.
Simpler Syntax
Authors: Culicover Peter W.
Published: February 2013

A syntactic theory for natural language provides an account of the correspondences that hold between phonology and meaning. The core idea of Simpler Syntax is expressed by the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory theory is one that imputes the minimum syntactic necessary to mediate between phenology and meaning. This chapter summarizes the architecture of SS and reviews some of the implications of the SS approach for the analysis of phenomena such as ellipsis, control and raising, argument alterations such as active/passive, and A' construction.
Medieval Medicine
Authors: Horden Peregrine
Published: February 2013

European scholastic medicine, the primary form of medieval medicine, was distinct from that of antiquity, despite its thorough-going Galenism. This article looks more closely at the scholarship that has made this re-evaluation possible. The practical dimension of scholastic medicine — as evident in the resolution of conflicts between Galen and Aristotle as in discussions of specific drugs — has been fully revealed in this newer historiography. It discusses medicine as essentially a verbal and gestural performance that aims to leave patients ‘satisfied’ and the answer to these questions comes from the theoretical writings that are the main material deposit of all the rhetoric and from adopting the patient's perspective. The principal achievements thus far of the historiography of medieval medicine have been to assess many of the main texts on their own terms, avoiding reference to biomedicine, and giving the texts first an intellectual context and then, more recently, a social one.
Medicine and Modernity
Authors: Cooter Roger
Published: February 2013

This article delineates the integral place of medicine and corporeal thought in the structuring and sustaining of ‘the modernist project’. It is predicated on an understanding of the transcendence of modernity in ‘postmodernity’. It also discusses briefly the place of modernism in medicine. First, though, a brief survey of ‘the modern’ in medicine is in order. The concept of modernity has been a major source of acrimony, anxiety, and debate since at least the sixteenth century. Its pursuit in the history and historiography of medicine demands much more than simply tracing innovations, and far more than merely challenging vague assignments of the label to scientific institutions and authorities formalizing the status of health and disease.
Public Health
Authors: Hamlin Christopher
Published: February 2013

This article begins with an expansive and ideal concept of health, which can serve as an analytical tool to evaluate public health. History is frequently deployed in the shaping of public health institutions. As such, public health history has often been a form of social criticism. It recognizes ways in which a society has not facilitated health and explores how it might better do so. This article discusses three reasons that project of bettering the public's health draws on history. Interest in public health emerged at the confluence of two related historical questions, which, with some additions, continue to frame much public health history. The grand issues of politics, power, and possibility remain central; the prospect for policies that will improve health overall is much less positive than it once was.
Histories of Heterodoxy
Authors: Bivins Roberta
Published: February 2013

Heterodox captures the oppositional qualities of ‘alternative’ without insisting on them and thereby ruling out complementarity. This article summarizes the history of heterodox medicine. This survey uses brief case studies to examine the emergence of a global medical marketplace and ideas from the Age of Exploration to the end of the Enlightenment. It focuses on heterodox medicine in Europe and the post-Columbian Americas because it is in these cultures that a self-identified and deliberately exclusive orthodoxy has been at the heart of medical ideology and professional development and fundamental to medical consumerism. This article then turns to the rise of explicitly ‘alternative’ systems like mesmerism and homoeopathy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the incorporation of some of those systems into biomedicine in the twentieth century. Finally, it looks at the recent historiography of heterodox medicine, and lays out potential directions for future scholarship.
Single‐and Multi‐Name Credit Derivatives: Theory and Practice
Authors: Lipton Alexander , Shelton David
Published: February 2013

Credit derivatives are contracts whose payouts reference credit events. Depending upon the precise terms of the contract, credit events may include not just the default of a company, but also other events such as restructuring or conservatorship. These subtle differences of definition make little difference in the benign stages of the credit cycle, but when credit events start occurring, they assume high importance. This article begins by summarising some of the most common credit derivative contracts. It then analyses the Gaussian copula model, other copula models, base correlations, pricing bespoke collateralised debt obligations, developments since the Gaussian copula and base correlations, the portfolio loss distribution, and stochastic recovery.
Numeracy and Metrology
Authors: Chambon Grégory
Published: February 2013

This article explores some interactions between numeracy, metrology, material culture, and scribal activity within the social and cultural context of Mesopotamia. It analyzes the metrology in the city of Ebla in the third millennium bc in order to out the local complexity of the relationship between practical uses of metrology and written metrological systems. It highlights the complexity of the relationship between material culture, which guides the development of metrological systems that respond to specific needs, and scribal practices capable of borrowing conventional notations from other regions while adapting them to local systems of measurement.
Patron and Client: Zimri-Lim and Asqudum The Diviner
Authors: Charpin Dominique
Published: February 2013

This article examines the patron-client relationship of Zimri-Lim, appointed king of Mari by the god Dagan, and the diviner Asqudum. It explains Zimri-Lim entrusted Asqudum with important administrative, diplomatic, and military responsibilities. In addition, Asqudum was also charged with negotiating Zimri-Lim's marriage to the princess Šibtu and then with accompanying her from Aleppo to the home of her new spouse. This article also describes Asqudum's divinatory, administrative, and commercial activities.
Letters as Correspondence, Letters as Literature
Authors: Vulliet Fabienne Huber
Published: February 2013

This article examines the use of letters and correspondence for literary purposes in ancient Mesopotamia. Cuneiform evidence reveals that there are many letters written between real people for everyday purposes of communication which were clearly literary. There are letters in which the vocabulary and language used are often far removed from the mundane diction of administrative and family letters. This article explores the complex relationship between archival and literary letters in cuneiform culture.
Keeping Company With Men of Learning: The King as Scholar
Authors: Frahm Eckart
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on Mesopotamian rulers who were not just wise or learned, but had a demonstrable interest in the scribal culture of their age. It provides some general reflections on how the king's influence on the arts and sciences shaped the intellectual discourse of ancient Mesopotamia. It contends that the creation of this large corpus of texts with a focus on kings and kingship was an endeavour that involved, primarily, not the kings themselves, but scribes and scholars who were more or less immediately associated with them.
Introduction
Authors: Geweke John , Koop Gary , Van Dijk Herman
Published: February 2013

This article deals with substantial computation component and discusses powerful computers and simulation algorithms that lead to model development where Bayesian econometric methods are predominant. It includes flexible or nonparametric models. It also distinguishes econometrics from statistics by its combination of economic theory with statistics. This article addresses principles, methods, and applications in different parts. It deals with a set of issues namely, the use of computationally intensive posterior simulation algorithms, heterogeneity, and problems caused by proliferation of parameters. The models discussed in this article have increased range and level of complication. They are strongly infused with economic theory and decision-theoretic issues. This article covers a broad range of the methods and models used by Bayesian econometricians in a wide variety of fields.
Playing With Space:Making A Public In Middleton'S Theatre
Authors: Yachnin Paul
Published: February 2013

In a recent book, Making Publics in Early Modern Europe, the author and his fourteen collaborators developed an account of how works of art and intellect, and the people who made and enjoyed them, changed the shape of early modern European society by creating what they called ‘publics’, which they defined as ‘new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank, or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals’. They described publics as ‘dynamic social entities that are constituted in part by the making public of particular kinds of made things along with their makers and partakers’. However, they observed that describing public making in this way made ‘it sound as if the public were an already-existing space into which things and people could be inducted, but in fact public making is a process by which social and material relations are reassembled so that a public space ... is created where one did not exist before’. This article asks, just what was this public space? How was it made? To begin to answer these questions, the article focuses on how Thomas Middleton's drama fashioned a public space where one did not exist before, on what the character of that space was, and on how Middleton's spatial innovations helped to create a new form of public association among a heterogeneous group of people. It suggests that by playing with space, Middleton's drama made a theatrical public with its own space of publicity.
The Ecology Of The Passions In A Chaste Maid In Cheapside and The Changeling
Authors: Paster Gail Kern
Published: February 2013

This article analyses the plays A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Changeling, which introduce passions of the embodied self as physically embedded in particular environments. The two plays show that Middleton's drama provides vivid examples of the early modern understanding of emotions as material events – bodily in origin, humoural in nature, and influenced by social and environmental factors inside and outside the embodied self. They offer sharply contrasted environments where emotional demands could hardly be more different. Human beings are depicted as highly volatile, tossed around by their passions like rudderless boats tossed about by winds and waves. In such strongly contrasted environments, it is easy to see emotions as physical and social transactions between individuals rather than as a private experience within the body of the individual subject, and thus to see the production of certain emotions as characteristic of different social worlds. This is what, in another context, the author has called the ecology of the passions – using the word ecology in its contemporary scientific sense as the study of an organism's relations with its surroundings, but retaining a sense of the word's Greek roots in oikos, or home. The passions are at home in the self, but they are also transactions with a social and physical environment.
Tragicomic Men
Authors: Henley Trish Thomas
Published: February 2013

This article investigates Middleton's use of the transgressive genre of tragicomedy to critique both dominant and emergent discourses of masculinity. What happens when ideologies of male honour, rank, and family conflict? What do these contradictions do to early modern notions of male subjectivity? What do they say about a political system predicated upon patriarchal ideology? And, lastly, how do definitions of male subjectivity shift when the patriarchal economy moves from feudalism to the proto-capitalist marketplace? The article argues that Middleton's dialogic tragicomedy makes clear the contradictions inherent in patriarchal ideology and reveals even the most traditionally ‘honourable’ of masculine subject positions to be motivated by self-interest and narcissism.
Middleton, Plautus, And The Ethics Of Comedy
Authors: Hardin Richard F.
Published: February 2013

This article introduces some related ideas on Middleton's appropriation of his ancestors, ideas that at least muddle the neat dichotomy of moral versus immoral comedy. It calls attention specifically to a spirit of alienation, of impartiality to moral good, that characterizes Middleton's comedies, a spirit to which Plautus and his English and Italian imitators were no strangers.
Staging Muteness in Middleton
Authors: Hackel Heidi Brayman
Published: February 2013

The inadequacy of the term ‘audience’ for the sensory experience of playgoing has been well noted by both early moderns and contemporary scholars: ‘there is no English term’, Andrew Gurr observes, ‘which acknowledges the full experience of both hearing and seeing the complete “action” of a play’. By the early seventeenth century, Gurr argues, the variety of theatrical spaces, playgoers, and repertories made ‘the choice between hearing and seeing ... an issue’. Recent scholarship has attuned us to the soundscapes of early modern England. This article inverts that scholarship in order to direct attention to early moderns who could not hear, and to explore moments on the early modern English stage when ‘the complete “action”’ did not include speaking.
Middleton And the Culture of Courtesy
Authors: Ghose Indira
Published: February 2013

This article explores the theme of courtesy in Middleton's plays. The Renaissance culture of courtesy is generally thought to stem from the publication of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528). Its fame spread rapidly all over Europe; numerous editions appeared, both in Italian and in translation. Written for an elite readership, The Book of the Courtier aimed to forge a new role for an aristocracy whose position was increasingly under threat. To this end, Castiglione adumbrated a form of courtly behaviour that decisively distinguished the aristocracy from the rest of society. In Middleton's city comedies, whose plots circulate around social climbers in the metropolis, the culture of courtesy is a game that can be exploited for its comic potential. In his tragedies, refined behaviour represents a veneer of sophistication that hides a deeper decay. Manners, taste, and style are not a demonstration of innate virtue, nor do they have an ennobling effect. They remain a performance, games people play for a range of social stakes.
Middleton and Spain
Authors: Fuchs Barbara
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on Middleton's use of Spain and Spanish literature as settings and source material. While this penchant may surprise readers who expect from Middleton the Hispanophobia of a good Protestant, it corresponds to the larger cultural ambivalence about Spain in the early 1620s. In the early 1620s, the protracted negotiations for a possible marriage between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta, the sister of Philip IV, produced a spate of anti-Hispanic pamphlets. The crisis around Charles's possible marriage to a Catholic princess underscores how sustained and enduring the fascination with Spain really was, in that it could transcend the potent upwelling of popular sentiment against the union. Middleton penned the most scandalous response to Charles's marital adventures, in the wildly successful A Game at Chess.
Middleton as Poet
Authors: Campana Joseph
Published: February 2013

This article discusses Middleton as a poet. Middleton was certainly a poet, but his poems were neither his nor his age's most distinguished creations. The early poems range from suggestive if derivative, such as The Ghost of Lucrece, to almost unreadable, such as The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased. The article illustrates Middleton as a poet who worked in an array of modalities, the variety of which exceeded even that of Shakespeare. The intensities of crime and castigation, urbanity and commerce, plague and imprecation are central to an understanding of Middleton's poetics. To understand those intensities through signature moments throughout his works is to understand his purest moments in his most poetic works: Women Beware Women, A Game at Chess, and Microcynicon. To understand those works is to begin to approach how Middleton lives on.
Middleton And Ecological Change
Authors: Boehrer Bruce
Published: February 2013

This article discusses the environmental themes in Middleton's plays. Middleton depicts the natural world as a resource that Londoners, both citizens and courtiers alike, exploit with cynical rapacity, consuming it to fashion an urban order that precisely inverts its values. But while Middleton's plays engage what we would now call ecological subjects, the playwright's sensibility is by no means ecological in the current sense of the term. His concern with human souls far surpasses his combined interest in plants, animals, minerals, water, the air, the earth, and its climate. Middleton does understand that the natural world is changing, and that the growth of London has something to do with that change, but he understands these developments through early modern Europe's residual master-code of religious experience. He sees them, that is, as essentially spiritual rather than scientific events.
Corporatism and the Social Democratic Moment: The Postwar Settlement, 1945–1973
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: February 2013

Certain facts about postwar Europe seem self-evidently true. Undoubtedly the most salient was the division of Europe and the political, economic, social, and cultural antinomies that separated western capitalism from Soviet-style communism in the overarching context of the Cold War. If the Cold War itself stretched across four decades, from the heightening of international tensions in 1947–1948 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991, the postwar settlement's reliable solidities had already been breaking apart in the 1970s. The global economic downturn of 1973–1974 ended the postwar boom, shelving its promises of permanent growth and continuously unfolding prosperity. In those terms, the core of the postwar settlement lies in the years 1947–1973. This article explores the single most striking particularity of the post-1945 settlement, namely the centrality acquired by organised labour for the polities, social imaginaries, and public cultures of postwar European societies. First, it discusses democracy as a cultural project during 1945–1968. The article then looks at corporatism and social democracy, and concludes by assessing patterns of stability in Europe during the postwar period.
Europe and its Others: Is there a European Identity?
Authors: Passerini Luisa
Published: February 2013

For centuries, forms of European identity were built up through contrasts and oppositions, creating various forms of orientalism and occidentalism. It is useful to keep three levels of discussion distinct: that of the concrete procedure of the unification of Europe, that of the different ideas and ideologies regarding a united Europe, and that of identity. Multiculturalism has been suggested as the basis for an identity that could be recognised also by non-territorialised groups, such as foreigners or immigrants, and as the only possible basis for shaping a European political culture which could foster a European identity. In reference to Europeanness, the number and extension of currently possible cultural identities has increased. The process of globalisation, which has relativised the nation state, has led to the interpenetration of the European Union and other regions of the world. Thus it has suggested new conceptions of regional identities, in a modified vision of the relationship between self and other.
The Postcolonial Condition
Authors: Young Robert J.C.
Published: February 2013

The phrase ‘the postcolonial condition’ is usually invoked with respect to the particular state, as well as the common circumstances, of the many colonies that were freed from colonial rule during the second half of the twentieth century and are now living on the legacy of colonialism. Postcolonial conditions all over the world remain very substantially the product of European rule, given the extent of the European empires. While the rest of the world gradually frees itself from its postcoloniality, as it earlier freed itself from the shackles of colonialism, it is the Europe from which colonialism came that remains caught within the postcolonial condition: for this reason, the idea of ‘the postcolonial’ has had most currency in Europe. One aspect of the European postcolonial condition was the refusal to recognise its overall historical inevitability even as the decolonisation process was taking place. This article discusses the postcolonial condition in Europe, along with cultural production as well as postcolonial theory and Islam.
Things in Between: Splendour and Excess in Ming China
Authors: Clunas Craig
Published: February 2013

There is plenty of evidence that, during the Ming dynasty in China, the enjoyment of the fruits of commerce was not so frowned upon as the texts of orthodox morality and political economy might imply. The enormous quantities of surviving Ming material culture, which are continuously being augmented by archaeology (since people were buried with goods for use in the afterlife), range from secular and religious buildings, the paintings and calligraphy produced and consumed by the elite, through printed books, furniture, metalwork, textiles, jewellery, carving in a variety of materials from jade to bamboo, and ceramics to weapons and tools. What we find in Ming texts are ways of talking about what we now call ‘consumption’ in ways that are either negative or positive, but which are never detached from a discourse of morality, of good (or bad) governance, and ultimately of a universal order that links humanity and its actions to wider cosmic matters of harmony or disjointedness. This article discusses splendour and excess in Ming China.
Luxury, the Luxury Trades, and the Roots of Industrial Growth: A Global Perspective
Authors: Berg Maxine
Published: February 2013

Luxury and its discontents have become key areas of debate on our social condition in the late twentieth and early years of the twenty-first century. Luxury has become the common parlance of advertising and branding. It is part of the upscaling of consumer aspirations, and a turning away from the mass consumerism that underpinned consumer society from the 1960s to the 1980s. Aspirations are associated with luxury and designer goods, with lifestyle choices of affluence and distinction. Manufacturers give nearly every category of good they produce a premium brand; their products signal distinction and the pursuit of status. This phenomenon of upscaling, branding, and status-seeking through consumer goods has intensified dramatically since the 1980s, but it has also been with us a very long time. This article presents a global perspective on luxury, the luxury trades, and the roots of industrial growth. It examines luxury and consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, social science theory and luxury, luxury's historical context, the debates over luxury goods, luxury and the global economy, and global export ware.
Small Shops and Department Stores
Authors: Haupt Heinz‐Gerhard
Published: February 2013

Recent studies have carefully analysed the role of small shops and department stores, placing the emergence of department stores within the context of the broader changes that took place in the retail trade. This article looks at changes in the constellation of the retail trade, stressing the importance of consumer behaviour as both a factor influencing the trade and as a product of changes in the trade itself. It draws attention to the influence of the organization of shops upon consumers, and the effect of consumer attitudes upon the structure and appearance of the retailing trade. Furthermore, the article examines how much consumers adjusted to changing conditions of trade and the development of new retailing regimes, as well as the degree to which the trades themselves reacted to conditions in the labour market, the process of urbanization, and changes in consumer preferences. Finally, it discusses the triumph of self-service and supermarkets, the impact of retailing on time and space, the politics of retailing, and retailing as part of global history.
Saving and Spending
Authors: Calder Lendol
Published: February 2013

Monetization, which describes the process whereby money became the dominant means of exchange in developing commercial societies, is an economic development whose profound social, political, and cultural consequences are not yet well understood. The monetization of household economic life elevated practices that once affected only the wealthy – Fan Li's ‘golden rules for business success’ – to core competencies of living, mandatory for everyone. Reflecting on the scholarship that has examined saving and spending, this article examines consumption and why historians of consumer culture have not given the financial affairs of consumers the attention the subject deserves. The historical work that has been done, though sparse, amply demonstrates the rich potential of the financial arts for generating significant problem areas for research. Few other subjects in the glittering universe of consumption lead more directly to the largest questions we can ask about desire, virtue, and the construction of the modern self. The article also considers the history of thrift, money management, and financialization.
National Socialism and Consumption
Authors: Wiesen S. Jonathan
Published: February 2013

Many important works in the field of consumer studies focus on the United States and post-World War II Western Europe, with the former often cast as the paradigmatic example of consumer society. Notwithstanding the disruptions of the Great Depression and less-severe business cycles, these societies offer plentiful images of bustling stores, widening economic opportunities, and the emergence of politicized citizen-consumers. The unique violence of the movements – whether manifested in the militant machismo of Benito Mussolini or the genocidal thrust of National Socialism – sets fascism apart from other twentieth-century developments. This article addresses some of the questions that emerge from a consideration of fascism and consumption, focusing in particular on National Socialist Germany, where consumption served a uniquely harsh end. It explores how Nazism envisioned the function of buying, selling, and consuming; the extent to which consumption was shaped by the state's ideological priorities; Nazi visions of consumption; realities of consumption and marketing in the Third Reich; and the debate on consumption and consent.
Consumption, Consumerism, and Japanese Modernity
Authors: Gordon Andrew
Published: February 2013

The experience of people in Japan offers a rich body of evidence for a comparative and global study of consumption from early modern, through modern times, and to the postmodern period. One finds ample grist for the mill of economic historians seeking to measure the extent and the shifts in consumption of all manner of goods and services. One also finds sources in abundance from the seventeenth century onwards speaking to the politics and culture of regulating, lamenting, and celebrating consumption. Building on early modern foundations, consumption expanded in the era of self-conscious modernization that followed the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate (1868), with a turn to new goods alongside more widespread use of customary ones. As this happened, attitudes in Japan evolved as part of a global dialogue on consumer life. This article explores consumption, consumerism, modernity, and the post-war ascendance of consumers in Japan.
Domesticity and Beyond: Gender, Family, and Consumption in Modern Europe
Authors: Asquer Enrica
Published: February 2013

This article discusses the relationship between gender history and the history of the family, especially in the field of consumer studies, and examines works that consider the rise of a ‘modern’ public sphere, structured around mass consumption and potentially more inclusive with respect to women. Reframing Jürgen Habermas's account with a gender-conscious approach and recognizing the power of the discourse in shaping historical processes, some of the studies it considers critically utilize the Habermasian assumption that commercial culture caused a radical transformation of the classic bourgeois public realm. Focusing on the contemporary debate about women shoppers and the challenge they posed to the masculine public sphere, these works explore the tensions between different ‘publics’ that were emerging in the nineteenth century within European societies and the changing ways in which domesticity and motherhood were linked to consumer culture. The article also looks at the politicization of everyday life in twentieth-century Europe.
Children's Consumption in History
Authors: Cook Daniel Thomas
Published: February 2013

The academic study of children as consumers took root in the 1960s and did not begin in earnest until the 1970s, when the paradigm of ‘consumer socialization’ took hold among psychologically oriented business scholars. In the 1980s, some discussion of the history of children's consumption and popular culture began to appear in edited volumes and journal articles, with full treatments of some aspects of that history coming into view in the 1990s. Even as children's consumer culture takes centre stage in contemporary media reports, political punditry, and academic scholarship, the history of children's consumption remains largely unrecognized in, or otherwise marginal to, both histories of childhood and histories of consumption. Children's consumer lives or the popular culture of childhood most often occupy a side or subsidiary position in the overall historiography of childhood as in, for instance, recent works by Steven Mintz and Hugh Cunningham. It appears that, in a time of severe economic depression, both parents and commercial actors looked to childhood and the ‘child’ as promising bearers of hope for the future.
Social networks and online community
Authors: Haythornthwaite Caroline
Published: February 2013

The very notion of community in an online context can begin a hot debate. Those who would keep the term ‘community’ for the imagined ideal of cooperation and joint sharing of land, resources, and goals ask: How can community exist without physical co-location and a geographic touchstone? How can the leanness of computer-mediated communication support the richness inherent in a community? This article revisits the debate about community and online community, and offers a means of conceptualizing and investigating online community using a social network perspective that frees it from its former geographical constraints. It begins with a look at the challenges to community that have fed into arguments against online community, and with a section on the discovery of community online. The article then addresses the case for a network view of community, starting with how the social network approach has been applied to offline communities and how this lays the groundwork for unbundling community from face-to-face interaction and geographic co-location. Following a brief section on the basics of social-network terminology, it returns to the main topic of community, with a focus on the network-level aspects of community, showing how patterns of interpersonal ties can build a network with outcomes greater than the sum of the pairwise connections. The final sections explore variants on the theme of community, first by revisiting the online and offline dichotomy and addressing the advantages, and indeed the inevitability, of considering community from both online and offline sides.
Digital deception
Authors: Hancock Jeffrey T.
Published: February 2013

The prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives has given rise to an important set of questions at the intersection of deception and technology, referred to as ‘digital deception’. These questions include issues concerned with deception and self-presentation, such as how the Internet can facilitate deception through the manipulation of identity. A second set of questions is concerned with how we produce lies. For example, do we lie more in our everyday conversations in some media than in others? Do we use different media to lie about different types of things, to different types of people? This article examines these questions by first elaborating on the notion of digital deception in the context of the literature on traditional forms of deception. It considers identity-based forms of deception online and the lies that are a frequent part of our everyday communications.
Land and Sea: The Environment
Authors: Smout T. C.
Published: February 2013

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topographers spoke of the Scottish environment as though it were a given, a gift from a good, but often incomprehensible, God. The food of all life on earth rests ultimately on photosynthesis, the process by which vegetable growth is able to capture solar energy. Compared to other parts of the British Isles, Scotland suffered from two interlinked disadvantages in garnering photosynthetic energy. The first was altitude and slope, and the second was climate. The most critical developments in the environmental history of Scotland after 1750 related to energy supply. Two forces were at work: a change in the availability of food energy and a revolution in the application of thermal energy. Since 1950, there have been changes in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries; advances in pollution control; and the rise of an environmental movement. What happens on land is always better studied than what happens invisibly below the surface of the sea. Marine fisheries provide the example of the most profligate of all resource exploitations, not only in Scotland but throughout the globe.
Mythical Scotland
Authors: Kidd Colin , Coleman James
Published: February 2013

Historically, Scotland's myths have been subject to the fickleness and changing whims of ideological fashion, and turn out to have had much less staying power than the nation, whose supposed enduring essence they are meant to represent. It is possible to discern at least four distinct ‘moments’ of national mythmaking in Scotland between the sixteenth century and the present. These comprise the refashioning in the sixteenth century by the humanist Hector Boece and the humanist reformer George Buchanan of the origin legend of the Scottish nation inherited from the late medieval era; the replacement of this spurious account of Celtic antiquity in the 1760s by an equally fabulous account derived from what was believed to be epic poetry composed by a blind bard by the name of Ossian in the third century AD; the emergence of another romantic myth of Scots highlandism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; and, finally, in the nineteenth century, the myth of a democratic, Whig-Liberal Presbyterian tradition.
New Perspectives on Pre-union Scotland
Authors: Bowie Karin
Published: February 2013

Scotland before the Union of 1707 can be difficult to assess, for three reasons. First, views of the century before 1707 have been shaped by attitudes towards the Union itself. Most historians writing between 1707 and the mid-twentieth century saw the Union in a positive light. In the 1970s, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) sought to defend the Union against rising interest in Scottish devolution. Trevor-Roper insisted that the seventeenth century represented ‘the darkest age of Scottish history’, marked by the ‘feudal power of the nobility’, the ‘fanaticism of the clergy’, and an ‘arrested economy’. By 1707, he argued, the Scots' desperate situation gave them no choice but to sacrifice their ‘feeble’ Parliament and embrace incorporating union with England. This article analyses recent work to provide a fresh appraisal of pre-Union Scotland, focusing on three areas of supposed backwardness highlighted by Trevor-Roper: Scotland's society and politics; its intellectual culture; and its economy and trade.