bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Homo Economicus in Cameroon
Authors: Kom Ambroise
Published: January 2023

This chapter proposes a reading of the Cameroonian economy based on an economic agent’s view from below. Its intent is to cast complementary light on the conceptual, theoretical and empirical analyses constituting most of this work. It is therefore written from the point of view of the citizen who interacts daily with the institutions designing and implementing public policies, and small and medium-sized business that make up the economic fabric. The perspective adopted here is also long-term, briefly covering the economic and social approaches of the precolonial era as well as those of the colonial and post-independence eras. This analysis emphasizes the richness and the paradoxes of the Cameroonian economy, of its ruling elites, its private sector, and economic agents of various levels. The chapter emphasizes the need to improve the business environment in Cameroon, and to reform the education and training system.
Untold Perspectives about Cameroon’s Economy
Authors: Nkot Fabien
Published: January 2023

What is meant by the economy of a country? Is it the way in which the production and distribution of its goods and services is organized? Is it the visible and measurable economy as captured in various official statistics? Or is it the broader analysis of the way in which the country mobilizes the resources offered it by nature, as well as those produced by the work of its inhabitants, to satisfy the needs of its population? This chapter discusses difficulties in grasping the Cameroonian economy in its entirety—beyond its official aspects observed empirically. It argues that this “analytical misunderstanding” informs the disconnect between the knowledge conveyed about the Cameroonian economy and the country’s overall economic reality. It emphasizes the essentially extraverted structure of Cameroon’s economy and suggests paths for better analyses of the nature and structure of the economy of Cameroon
The Economics of Infrastructure in Cameroon: State, Challenges, and Policy Reforms
Authors: Bougna Théophile , Noumba Um Paul
Published: January 2023

In this chapter, we provide a critical assessment of infrastructure development and its role in enabling business and growth in Cameroon. We begin with a brief summary of the literature on the wider economic benefits of infrastructure investments. We also explore the current state of Cameroon infrastructure and the main challenges it faces. We then rely on a simple econometric framework to link Cameroon GDP growth with the stock of different infrastructure assets and the existing complementarities. The chapter main results are the following: First, there is an infrastructureled growth potential gap in Cameroon because its infrastructure stock is not at the level of the average African country. Second, the marginal productivity of highways infrastructure is higher compare to other transport infrastructures in Cameroon. However, there are potential efficiency gains and economic benefits of investing conjointly in different infrastructure sub-sectors, especially in highways, electricity, railways and ports. Third, there are institutional failures and deficiencies in Cameroon infrastructure which are at the heart of failure to implement satisfactorily a wide range of structural infrastructure projects. Addressing these governance gaps is a necessary condition to bring much hope for future infrastructure development and economic growth in Cameroon. Taping into the domestic and regional savings, improving the business environment, implementing effectively public-privatepartnerships, and attracting private equity investors to support infrastructure development are necessary conditions to put infrastructure at the heart of Cameroon’s economic success.
Agriculture Transformation
Authors: Fregene Martin , Kahasha Gracia
Published: January 2023

Cameroun is an agrarian country with the agricultural sector accounting for 22.5% of GDP. The agriculture sector is also the leading provider of jobs, representing nearly 43% of employed adults in 2020. With five agro-ecological zones, Cameroon’s crop, silviculture, livestock and fisheries sub-sectors could be a source of economic transformation, and a springboard for inclusive and sustainable growth. However, Cameroon’s agri-food industry is under-performing and average productivity levels of crop, livestock and aquaculture are still well below global averages. This chapter examines the main challenges of Cameroon’s agriculture sector. It presents the Government’s strategy to transform agriculture, and discusses lessons from successful approaches which are relevant to Cameroon’s ambition to transform its agriculture.
Female Entrepreneurship in Africa
Authors: Aly Mbaye Ahmadou , Gueye Fatou , Benjamin Nancy
Published: January 2023

This paper examines data on formal and informal firms in Cameroon and explores the links between female direction of firms and the obstacles known to keep firms from reaching their full potential.  The strong presence of women in the informal sector can be explained by several factors, including the size of their business activities, their poor access to education and training, as well as to financing, and institutional and socio-cultural constraints. We present results from a survey of 435 formal and informal enterprises in Yaounde and Douala.The surveys show women to be more exposed to symptoms of informality and precariousness than men. The types of activities most associated with female entrepreneurship are very small businesses, more excluded from most public infrastructure services including water, electricity, telephone and internet infrastructure services than are male-directed firms.We use a simple logistic regression model to test the profile of female entrepreneurship.  Results show a strong correlation between sector of activity and gender, significant because of the strong correlation observed between sector and productivity.  Finally, results show that lack of access to electricity is a key indicator of female entrepreneurship.
Financing Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Cameroon
Authors: Tawah Regina Nsang
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents an overview of the small and medium enterprises sector as well as the banking sector in Cameroon. Data from various sources show that the banking sector is highly concentrated and the majority of the interests are foreign. The banking sector serves about 15 percent of the population. The chapter further uses firm-level data from the 2016 World Bank Enterprise Survey on the characteristics of SMEs in Cameroon for some estimations to determine the effect of the characteristics of the firm on SMEs’ access to working capital in banks. The results show that the size of the firm, its legal status, and some foreign activities could improve access to bank finance for SMEs. A second regression to determine firm characteristics that affect access to investments revealed that firm size and legal status were the only statistically significant variables. Given that access to funding is significantly related to the size of the firm, medium to large firms have a clear advantage relative to smaller firms in obtaining the bank financing for both working capital and investment. SMEs in Cameroon will benefit from more opportunities to build relationships with the banks. The banks could carry out intentional outreach to SMEs for less formal activities and the government promotion apparatus could leverage their resources by adding connecting SMEs to the private sector banks since their presence is limited to a few cities.
Withholding Trust
Authors: Muñoz José-María
Published: January 2023

For more than two decades now, Cameroon’s most prominent private sector representatives have singled out the processing of value-added tax refunds as a serious hindrance to economic activity in the country. The dimensions of this problem and its intractability derive to a large extent from a feature of the tax system known as VAT withholding. The consensus is that VAT withholding allows the state to attain certain revenue levels by modifying the normal operation of VAT and entrusting tax collection tasks to public agencies and a select group of large companies. Withholding is thus seen as a device that, while not technically optimal, enables the tax authorities to cope with VAT-related administrative challenges that they are judged not to be ready to meet fully. This chapter supplements such an expert story by focusing on how withholding is premised on sorting businesses into taxpaying categories. In the process, commercial might and managerial standards are equated and couched in terms of civic morality. The result is a deeply discriminatory tax system that treats all but a small minority of businesses as untrustworthy.
Education
Authors: Dia Kamgnia Bernadette , Bergaly Kamdem Cyrille
Published: January 2023

Education increases people's productivity and creativity, as well as promoting entrepreneurship and advanced technologies. Also, education plays a crucial role in ensuring economic and social progress, thus improve income distribution. Its management nourished the economic debates over the years, triggered by authors such as Schultz, Becker, Mincer, Arrow, Spence, Psacharopoulos, Stiglitz, Acemoglu. Some authors pointed out that investment in education has a positive effect on its profitability, whereas for others, the effect of investment on education is small or even negative. Some others even supported the existence of a Laffer curve on returns to education. Education systems in Sub-Saharan Africa fall under the second group, due to the predominance of the informal sector which has become the only viable option for making a modest living, even for those with secondary, vocational, and tertiary education, in many African countries, including Cameroun. Based on the 2014 Cameroon household survey, in which only 9% of the individuals worked in the formal sector under a contract, positive and significant returns to education, as high as 80% for women, were found. Proper data must be collected to confirm the current findings, hence firmly reject the hypothesis of negative returns to education in a Sub-Saharan African country, as Cameroon.
Health Outcomes and Health Care Financing in Cameroon
Authors: Ntembe Augustin
Published: January 2023

Although a bulk of health care expenditures in Cameroon is derived from private out-pocket, the government of Cameroon is the most important provider of health services in the country. The current chapter examines the relationship between public and private health expenditures and health outcomes in Cameroon. A fully modified ordinary least squares estimator for cointegrating regression that includes deterministic variables as regressors were estimated using time series for the period 1990-2018. The study controlled for real per capita income and immunization against Diptheria, Pertussis (whooping cough), and Tetanus and found that public expenditures on health care, immunization, and real per capita income have a significant long-run relationship with infant and under-5 mortality rates in Cameroon. The results suggest that public and private spending on health care should be expanded and redirected to services that have the most impact on health outcomes.
Experience as an Excess of Givenness
Authors: Mandray Sara
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents the post-metaphysical phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion: a phenomenology with the purpose of classifying the appearing of phenomena in a hierarchy according to their different degrees of givenness. From poor phenomena to the phenomenon of revelation, Marion questions our lack of concepts when facing the world as it appears. The Marionian gifted (echoing the transcendental subject) finds herself first called by a given word, in other words constituted by the given. This originary condition of the gifted leads Marion to investigate the paradoxical phenomena—or saturated phenomena—characterized by an excess in givenness which saturates our intelligibility. Saturated phenomena give themselves through the four dimensions which identify the phenomenon as a given in general: quantity (event, crisis), quality (idol), relation (flesh), and modality (icon). Saturation, this exception from a metaphysical point of view, becomes the norm of the post-metaphysical phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion.
At the Crossroad of Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism
Authors: Gherardi Silvia
Published: January 2023

This chapter invites us to an experimental encounter at the crossroads of phenomenology and feminist new materialism in which neither the reader nor the author knows in advance what onto-epistemological knowledge will emerge from the mix of concepts, bodies, images, and affects. It invites us to focus on embodiment and to follow a line of thought that belongs neither to the initiator nor to the reader, but happens ‘between them’. It proposes to the readers to immerse themselves in several short stories, coming from different sources, and to consider them as resources to think with. The diffraction of narratives, like the movement of the waves, produces six interferences in between the concept of embodiment with ordinary affect, corpomateriality, transcorporeality, virtual embodiment, becoming-animal, and affective pedagogy. The chapter ends with a discussion of the methodology of diffractive reading.
‘How about a Hug?’
Authors: Strati Antonio
Published: January 2023

In this essay, the continuous references between the visual language of art photography and that of the written wor(l)d underline the relevance of ‘playing with philosophy’ on the basis of the organizational knowledge acquired through study. Through the photograph Homage to Giorgio de Chirico the chapter depicts the resonances between Italian metaphysical art, the aesthetic approach to the study of organizational experience, and phenomenological and aesthetic philosophy. At the core are the themes of the liberation from anthropomorphism, the aesthetic quality of organizational materiality, and the return to study of philosophical theories and great masters. The chapter illustrates and discusses how playing with the plurality of languages, both from a semantic and from a poetic point of view, has great relevance for aesthetic research on organizational experience, because the aesthetic quality of the discourse on organizing is enriched by the evocative process of knowledge.
What Silence Does
Authors: Introna Lucas , Kavanagh Donncha , Brigham Martin
Published: January 2023

Organization studies has a substantial literature on why employees stay silent when confronted by dysfunctional or unethical behaviour. Within this literature, organizational silence is typically depicted as having negative effects. This chapter builds on a smaller literature that sees silence more positively and productively. Intellectually, it draws on Hannah Arendt’s ideas on thinking as an internal aporetic dialogue that finds expression in dialogue with others. Thinking, for Arendt, is not about producing knowledge or practical wisdom but about discovering the meaning of things through connecting the private (silent) space of thinking with the public space of the political world of common action. Her ideas are well-illustrated in the meeting practices of the Quakers, a non-conformist Christian denomination that originated in the mid-17th century. Quaker meetings for business enact a political space where participants share their thoughts as equals, bound together in a unity of difference, where one’s silent thoughts and the contributions of others become entangled in a manner that allows for some collective sense to emerge (or not). This chapter proceeds to consider how formal rationality can threaten to obliterate the possibility of thinking and, conversely, how thinking without reasoning is equally dysfunctional. Finally, the chapter points to how our inquiry into Arendt, silence, and Quaker meetings can help us reflect on the concrete practices that exist in other contexts that might enable the enlargement of mind and collective sense-making.
Enframing and Transformation
Authors: Olivier Abraham
Published: January 2023

The phenomenological method, with its various approaches to studying the seminal structures of lived experience, has been a cornerstone in the thought of various African philosophers. However, their specific contributions to phenomenology are often neglected in the larger discursive terrain of African philosophy, post-colonialism and decolonization, and the global phenomenology movement. This chapter sets out to explore Serequeberhan’s special contribution to what one can call an African hermeneutic phenomenology. This chapter’s focus is on his critical adoption of Heidegger’s works in his books The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (1994) and Existence and Heritage (2015). More specifically, the chapter explores Serequeberhan’s elaboration on the problem of what Heidegger calls ‘enframing’ (Ge-stell)—the ensnarement of phenomena through their reduction to entities for industrial use within the framework of technocratic modernism. I venture to show that Serequeberhan uses the concept enframing to characterize the organization of ‘lived existence’ in the post-colonial context. Enframing manifests in the hierarchical structures of neo-colonial global capitalism used to organize social, political, and economic life within but also beyond the post-colonial African context. Enframing warrants transformation. Thus, ultimately, this chapter explores Serequeberhan’s call for ‘a transformed abode of man in the world’.
Phenomenology in Japan
Authors: Uemura Genki
Published: January 2023

This chapter outlines the development of Japanese phenomenology from its beginning to early in the 21st century. Section 28.2 focuses on the initial phase of its reception in Japan in the 1910s. A remarkable feature common in discussions of this period is that Japanese philosophers interpreted Husserl with reference to Neo-Kantianism. This perspective would persist in the reception of phenomenology in Japan into the 1920s, on which Section 28.3 focuses. This period is striking because, for one thing, Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology had an impact even before the publication of his Being and Time in 1927. Even more importantly, it was in this same period that researchers from applied areas began to show an interest in phenomenology. Section 28.4 deals with how phenomenology in prewar Japan came into full maturity between the latter half of the 1920s and the middle 1930s. This section will argue that phenomenological research in applied areas also reached a high point in this phase of its maturation. Section 28.5 touches on selected episodes of phenomenology in postwar Japan, emphasizing discussions over its application.
Postscript
Authors: Ingold Tim
Published: January 2023

What does phenomenology entail for the practice of field research? Is the anthropological method of participant observation, in taking the world as a milieu of study, rather than its object, intrinsically phenomenological? To answer these questions, I describe how in my work as an ecological anthropologist, starting from a perspective rooted in the natural sciences, I eventually found myself, after a detour through ecological psychology, dipping into the writings of first Heidegger and then Merleau-Ponty. Revisiting my fieldnotes, they turn out to serve less as a repository of qualitative data that as an aid to memory, making it possible to relive past experience in the here and now. Rarely had I captured this experience in my notes, which are largely confined to what I had observed or what people had told me. It rather wells up through the cracks in the factual record. But it is not so much in participant observation and writing fieldnotes as in their subsequent writing up as ethnography, that anthropology finally parts company with phenomenology. Truly phenomenological writing, I conclude, differs from conventional ethnography in that it is a writing ‘with’ rather than ‘about’. This means joining our own lines with the writing of the world, so that the minds of readers can, in turn, mingle with ours.
The Self in the World
Authors: Savage Paul , Franck Henrika
Published: January 2023

Paul Ricoeur’s work on phenomenology proposes a self in the world, in a world that is acted upon by, and acting upon, the self. This chapter outlines some of the major movements Ricoeur made during his long and prolific academic career. His method was to create dialogue between two juxtaposed positions and explore how, together, they offer more than their separate parts. The particular and the general, as well as the abstract and the concrete, became the planes upon which Ricoeur positions the self in relation to the other, through language and narrative, in time. This chapter’s aim is to articulate Ricoeur’s way of understanding experience in the light of his varied approaches to the self.
The Deep History of Musicality
Authors: Killin Anton
Published: January 2023

Absent from the behavioral repertoire of other great apes, music is a distinctive feature of human social life in all known cultures, and a valued feature—one that plays many roles in human life, as attested by the anthropological record. Music accompanies ritual and praise, is a pedagogical tool, endows events additional layers of cultural meaning, and provides entertainment and emotional and social experiences, to name but a few. Music is ancient: The musical traditions of the world’s cultures have deep roots. Complex musical artifacts appear in the archaeological record from 40,000 years ago. The oldest known are flutes (pipes) made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, discovered in the European Upper Palaeolithic. It was once thought that the art, music, and symbolism evidenced at those European sites bespoke a cognitive revolution around that time. This view of the evolution of behavioral modernity has been deeply challenged over the last 20 years or so; gradualist theories now place the evolution of behavioral modernity and the distinctively human cognitive capacities underwriting that behavior earlier in our pre-exodus African forebears. Debate remains about the character of that evolutionary trajectory. Taking music as a case in point, this chapter provides examples of theories of music’s origins and evolution and argues for a coevolutionary perspective that sees music as known today as emerging from a mosaic of features. It examines recent work in evolutionary cognitive archaeology connecting Acheulean stone tool production with a widespread human capacity—entrainment—requisite for much music making and recounts the controversy over the alleged “Neandertal flute.”
The Cultural Ecology of Fear
Authors: Pettitt Paul
Published: January 2023

Cognitive archaeology has curiously neglected the evolution of human funerary belief and practice, despite the abundance of evidence for this remarkably diverse aspect of human behavior in the archaeological record. Palaeoanthropologists have taken a somewhat black-and-white approach to the subject, often in terms of whether hominins did or did not practice burial and, therefore, whether they were “cognitively modern” or not. In recent years, the ethological information on animal responses to the dead has improved remarkably and offers strong contextual data from the biological world with which to begin to write an account of evolutionary thanatology. This chapter reviews the psychological and ethological data, establishing a hypothetical (and perhaps falsifiable) evolutionary scheme in which purely chemical responses to the corpse are increasingly supplemented by the emotions, a concept of death and the conception of souls, to the complex and modestly counterintuitive beliefs that can be glimpsed with the dawn of written records in the third millennium B.C. The chapter reviews the archaeological record in this light, suggesting three cognitive phases of evolution of funerary belief took primates from chemistry to culture in the form of widening landscapes of fear.
Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the Middle
Authors: Hinton Stephen
Published: January 2023

The notion of a cultural landscape conceived in terms of defining polarities with a “middle” territory in between predates the concept of a “middlebrow” in Western music history by almost a century. Music’s juste milieu, made famous by Schumann, derives from French political culture of the 1830s. Postdating the English term is mittlere Musik, a German concept from the Cold War era applied to a variety of music from the long nineteenth century, thus overlapping with, on the one hand, Schumann’s polemics and, on the other, with the aesthetics of what Walter Benjamin dubbed “the age of mechanical reproduction.” Exploring these three terms in relation to one another, the author scrutinizes the broader historical and aesthetic context of the prediction, made by Constant Lambert in 1934, that “the middlebrow composer will disappear” and presents historiographical reasons why the foretold “oblivion” has proved, in recent decades, to be inaccurate.
On or about 1932
Authors: Collins Sarah
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates themes of mechanization that appeared in negative constructions of the middlebrow in interwar Britain, focusing on debates about literature, music, and public broadcasting. These themes drew from an established rhetoric surrounding technological encroachments into the sphere of art, yet this chapter argues that they also reflected a broader skepticism toward forms of centralized governance. The characterization of the middlebrow as mechanized drew these concerns together and allowed critics to locate meaning and value in processes that went against the grain of standardization. This led some modernist critics to idealize amateur participation. By focusing on this set of themes, the chapter argues that the rhetoric surrounding the middlebrow was not simply a culture war staged by a compromised intellectual elite against the forces of cultural democratization but rather a much broader collection of anxieties about processes of centralization that implicated both the structure and the technologies of public service.
Music and the Good Life in Postwar Britain
Authors: Wiebe Heather
Published: January 2023

Australian pianist Eileen Joyce was one of the biggest musical celebrities in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, thanks in part to her work in films including Brief Encounter and The Seventh Veil. At the same time, her popularity generated anxiety among critics, who associated her with a stultification of orchestral culture. Joyce casts light on a more commercial side of middlebrow endeavors, and onto a postwar British effort to build a mass audience for art music by bringing the concert hall closer to the world of film and popular entertainment. She also shows how a concert culture directly aimed at social mobility and mass appeal was discounted by critics, who saw in its appeal to pleasure—as well as work—a threat to the health of music itself.
Bread and Champagne
Authors: Kupfer Peter
Published: January 2023

During the 1930s, a series of musical comedy films were made in the Soviet Union in which serious and popular musical styles and musicians are at first contrasted and then reconciled in an effort, the author suggests, to offer a particular vision of how music could function in the attainment of kul’turnost’, the new middle-class value of being cultured, educated, and civilized. This resonates with Pauline Fairclough’s recent proposal of a so-called “Soviet [musical] middlebrow”: a “style all of its own” that “sought to be a form of ‘high art’ for the masses.” But whereas she limits this to a top-down process in which composers of serious music adopted accessible styles, the author argues, following Marina Frolova-Walker, that the cross-pollination of the serious into the popular be understood as an equally important and effective manifestation of the “Soviet middlebrow.” Importantly, because the medium in question—comedy cinema—was itself a lowbrow genre that authorities and filmmakers wished to raise to the status of high art, in these films the middlebrow medium and message are aligned.
An Evolutionary Review of Female Intrasexual Competition
Authors: Fisher Maryanne L. , Krems Jaimie Arona
Published: January 2023

Research on female intrasexual competition has exploded over the last two decades. We provide an overview of the corpus of work, with the secondary aim of showing how this area conceptually grew over time. This chapter begins with historical perspectives of female intrasexual competition. We review how the field grew in response to scholars realizing the necessity of examining issues related to the promotion of female primates’ individual fitness. Then, we describe women’s aggression tactics and discuss how particularly indirect aggression is linked with women’s competitive strategies, lowered physical confrontation, and a decreased potential for physical harm. We note that the topic of women’s intrasexual competition has been overly dominated by mating-themed research, with far less attention toward ways that women compete in other domains that presumably heavily influence fitness. For example, only a few studies have examined competition among mothers, or on how mothers access limited resources for their children. Likewise, there has been little work on how women defend themselves against intrasexual aggression. We close with a discussion of future directions for research, with a focus on topics such as the importance of including non-WIERD samples in studying competition, competition among nonheterosexual women, the popularly discussed but highly academically neglected topic of “mommy judging,” and competition among women who are postmenopausal.
Evolving Connections
Authors: Birnbaum Gurit E.
Published: January 2023

Sexual urges and affectional bonding are not always interrelated. And yet, within romantic relationships, intimates typically serve as both attachment figures and sexual partners, such that the attachment and sexual systems may influence each other. In this chapter, I review the reciprocal associations between these two systems. I first introduce a model delineating the functional significance of sex in relationship development and the circumstances under which this function is more prominent. Then, I consider the reverse causal direction, providing an overview of the contribution of attachment processes to the construal of sexual encounters, including the kinds of desires that people wish to satisfy and what they view as desirable in partners. I conclude by suggesting future directions for studying the dual potential of sex for either deepening attachment to a current valued partner or promoting a new relationship when the existing relationship is no longer perceived to be worth retaining.
Marital and Sexual Satisfaction
Authors: Meltzer Andrea L.
Published: January 2023

What factors impact the extent to which people are satisfied with their marriages as well as their sexual relationships with their spouses? To address these questions, this chapter reviews the predominant theoretical frameworks and corresponding empirical evidence for the function of marital satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. It begins by highlighting the function of marital satisfaction and describing the predominant theoretical framework used to predict marital satisfaction: interdependence theory. Following this theoretical overview, the chapter discusses biological and environmental factors that lead to differences in people’s marital outcomes and provides suggestions for future research in this area. The chapter then turns to sexual satisfaction, providing an overview of the theoretical rationale for why some people are more versus less satisfied with their sexual relationships with their spouses and discusses numerous factors that influence sexual satisfaction in the context of marriage. The chapter concludes by suggesting several novel advances for furthering our understanding of married couples’ sexual satisfaction.
Sexual Coercion
Authors: Camilleri Joseph A.
Published: January 2023

This chapter reviews evolutionary theory and research on sexually coercive behavior. Such actions are diverse with respect to severity, types of acts, targets, and individual difference characteristics, and thus a comprehensive theoretical framework is needed to account for such diversity. Sexual selection has been prolific in explaining variation in sexual coercion between and within species, though controversies and criticisms stifled its application to humans. Ultimately, sexual coercion is motivated by a mating psychology that causes, or is a consequence of, sexual conflict, and can be understood in terms of psychological adaptations, by-products, and disorders. Among humans, understanding proximate and ultimate causes of sexual coercion has implications on assessing and treating sexual offenders.
Sociolinguistics and Superdiversity
Authors: Spotti Massimiliano , Blommaert Jan
Published: January 2023

This chapter first takes stock of the prolific relationship of superdiversity with sociolinguistics (Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Creese and Blackledge 2018) and the advancements superdiversity has helped the field make in reshaping its conceptual wealth and methodological armour. From there, the chapter reflects on the notion of “combinatorial spaces” (Arnaut, Karrebaek, Spotti and Blommaert 2017), using it as a lens that—once appraised from an ethnographic interpretive perspective—could avoid the analysis of (im)mobility and complexity to fall into easy celebrations of individuality versus “bake and break” hybridity. Last, the chapter moves toward gaining insight into the more recent application of superdiversity and sociolinguistics within the online-offline nexus, putting it in relation to the recent re-appreciation of Durkheim’s ([1895] 1919) notion of sociation and the “social fact”. Ultimately, the chapter opens up its analysis to new forms of imaginable vocabulary that may help the sociolinguistic ethnographic analyst who wishes to dissect human beings’ creativity as flagged out in everyday communicative exchanges and sociosemiotic identity performances, while tying it down to the importance of après Durkheim’s work in furthering the understanding of the superdiverse “human in the digital.”
Addressing Inequality in Peace Studies
Authors: McCandless Erin , Schwoebel Mary Hope
Published: January 2023

Three decades ago the United Nations recognized the peace-development nexus, and its appeal continues to grow in policy, practice, and scholarship. This nexus assumes an awareness of the deep interconnections between peace and development, and that the sole pursuit of either cannot achieve sustainable results. This chapter reflects on the evolution of the nexus, its place within peace studies, and its engagement by both the development and peace communities in policy and practice. Aware that a discipline should be able to speak effectively to the critical challenges of the times, the chapter examines a core conflict issue of our era—inequality—through the perspective of the peace-development nexus. Conclusions reflect on the direction of the nexus and its meaning for the viability and value of peace from a historical lens in order to address contemporary challenges.
AI, Fintech, and the Evolving Regulation of Consumer Financial Privacy
Authors: Aggarwal Nikita
Published: January 2023

One of the most notable developments in financial markets over the last 50 years is the growing role of digital technology—a trend often referred to as “fintech.” This chapter examines fintech through the lens of consumer financial privacy, focusing on the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and increasingly data-driven consumer finance. It makes two principal contributions. First, taking a historical perspective, it examines the evolution of consumer financial privacy and its regulation under English law, from the duty of bank confidentiality to cross-sectoral data protection regulation. It demonstrates that this evolution has been shaped directly by the rise of fintech. Second, it analyses the latest phase in fintech—AI and data-driven decision-making—and examines the opportunities and challenges that this presents for the regulation of consumer financial privacy. Although the chapter focuses on English law, it will also be relevant to other jurisdictions that are grappling with the challenge of regulating consumer financial privacy in the era of fintech and AI.
To Bring Back the Summer
Authors: Loring Stephen , Arbour Chelsee , Jenkinson Anthony , Ashini Napes
Published: January 2023

The Innu have a history in the Québec–Labrador Peninsula that reaches back at least 8,000 years as testified by Innu atanukana (“legends”) and archaeology. Though muffled by millennia, the stories people tell, such as Kautuasukuaniskuanast (the boy who brought back the summer and who was transformed into the White-Crowned Sparrow), are parables of Innu history that document the arrival of Innu ancestors in the peri-glacial world of Nitassinan. More recent history has been appropriated by colonial institutions presenting the past as belonging (like the present and future) to the newly arrived French (Mastukushut) and English (Akaneshaut). Other than as part of the backdrop to a heroic tableau involving intrepid French and English “explorers” and adventurers, the Innu are thoroughly absent. Archaeology has the potential to help “bring back the summer” and possibly give voice to an unwritten Innu history by recognizing and disrupting the currently unquestioned/unequal power dynamic between western and Indigenous versions of the past.
The Sociology of Africa
Authors: Sooryamoorthy R. , Khalema Nene Ernest
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents the case for the sociology of Africa. Although Africa provides a diverse stage for the study of societies, attempts to build and develop an integrated sociology of Africa have yet to be made by social scientists and sociologists. While sociological knowledge is being produced by both the African diaspora and those living on the continent, it does not yet constitute an organized sociology of Africa. The handbook demonstrates that there is a timely need to broaden the sociological understanding of African societies by illustrating the pertinence of relevant sociological themes. The themes explored constitute the integral components of the sociological knowledge of African societies. The key topics include the context and perspectives of the sociology of Africa, race, ethnicity and religion; gender, sexuality and intersectionality; medical sociology; political economy and development; crime and violence; and the family and education.
Race and Its Sociological Inquiry in Africa
Authors: Khalema Nene Ernest
Published: January 2023

Contemporary studies on “race” in Africa have given rise to new openings in studying and analyzing human differences that challenge the colonial impositions of notions of human diversity as a biological construct and proxy marker of differences. In sociology and the sociology of Africa, many theoretical and conceptual considerations about the meaning and utilization of “race” have been developed. Sociological inquiry on “race” in Africa has mostly adopted and perpetuated colonial indulgences about human differences and has exploited “race” to ration power for reasons utilizing diverse means. Informed by the Foucauldian analysis of discourse as a critical framework of knowledge production, situated power and resistance, this chapter aims to address how African sociology has responded to the dominant use of the concept of “race.” The chapter comments on the methodological dilemmas in measuring “race” and exposes the postcolonial problematic suppositions in its enquiry. The chapter shows how colonial classification schemes adopted and adapted in contemporary postcolonial states limit the necessary decolonial analysis of human differences and what African sociology can potentially contribute.
Creation and Consumption Experience of Cultural Value in Contemporary Art
Authors: Fillis Ian , Lee Boram , Fraser Ian
Published: January 2023

This article utilizes marketing theory to improve insight into the value relating to visual art creation and consumption by advancing understanding of its roles in the creation of the cultural value associated with contemporary art. This theoretical analysis enables construction of a conceptual model of value creation. The authors inform this by drawing on their qualitative research data on the cultural value of a contemporary art exhibition. Creation and sharing of value, including networks and discourses of value, are central to this agenda. Aesthetic experience and symbolic consumption are as influential or more so than instrumental measures of value. This can be visualized in a circle of value involving culture, marketing, and consumption, which shape meaning. A competency spectrum can be used to explain how and why each stakeholder behaves differently with respect to the cultural value present.
Performance Evaluation in the Arts
Authors: Chiaravalloti Francesco
Published: January 2023

Arts management research on performance evaluation has been characterized by an applied approach, focusing on providing arts organizations with performance evaluation models and techniques, rather than seeking to understand the meaning of performance and its evaluation in the specific contexts in which individual organizations operate. However, the latter is a precondition for developing and implementing performance evaluation systems that mirror the reality of artistic work and are thus useful for both organizations and their stakeholders. This chapter reviews two bodies of literature: critical accounting studies and valuation studies. Though both fields have remained lateral to arts management research so far, the review shows that critical accounting studies can contribute to a better understanding of the friction between different logics that emerges from the application of new public-management-oriented procedures of evaluation to arts organizations. At the same time, they show the limits of accounting in representing the alternative logics and systems of evaluation that arts organizations apply in order to compensate for the inadequacy of those imposed by regulatory bodies. Valuation studies on the arts stimulate the inclusion of non-market-driven concepts of value and the valorization of aesthetic-emotional logics of evaluation rather than scientific-rational ones. In particular, they highlight forms of judgment that provide alternatives to the currently dominant calculative technologies of evaluation. Closing the current gap in understanding is the first step in a new pragmatic agenda for research on performance evaluation in the arts.
Creating a Slave Society? The Greek and Roman Impact on Egypt
Authors: Rowlandson Jane
Published: January 2023

Slavery in Pharaonic Egypt was a relatively minor phenomenon, with significant differences from slavery in Greek and Roman societies. The creation of the Ptolemaic state and the subsequent Roman conquest had important consequences for the history of slavery in Egypt. In the course of the Ptolemaic and Roman imperial periods, the introduction of Greek and Roman patterns of slaveholding alongside wider changes in the Egyptian economy and society led to a significant increase in the numbers and uses of slaves in Egypt. Egypt offers therefore an ideal case study for examining the changing history of ancient slavery and the entanglement between different slaving traditions. The exceptional nature of Egyptian documentary papyri makes it possible to explore subjects like patterns of slaveholding, gender ratios among slaves, and the employment of slaves in different economic sectors.
Commissurotomy
Authors: Henninger Polly
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses findings from patients who have undergone commissurotomy and callosotomy using lateralization techniques. Commissurotomy is a neurosurgical procedure that aims to prevent seizure activity from generalizing from one hemisphere across the corpus callosum to the other. Complete commissurotomy patients are known as split-brain subjects. The chapter first reviews the history of commissurotomy before providing an overview of commissurotomy and callosotomy. It then considers how the surgical procedure is performed, the ramifications of a split brain, and split-brain research undertaken at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech). It also examines the use of Z lens and lateral limits techniques to test visual functions in split-brain patients, and visuospatial processing and information processing styles in commissurotomy subjects. Finally, the chapter analyzes consciousness in the split brain versus intact brain, the debate over whether the intact brain has unified or dual consciousness, and studies of the corpus callosum.
Distance determination of molecular clouds in the first quadrant of the Galactic plane using deep learning: I. Method and results
Authors: Fujita Shinji , Ito Atsushi M , Miyamoto Yusuke , Kawanishi Yasutomo , Torii Kazufumi , Shimajiri Yoshito , Nishimura Atsushi , Tokuda Kazuki , Ohnishi Toshikazu , Kaneko Hiroyuki , Inoue Tsuyoshi , Takekawa Shunya , Kohno Mikito , Ueda Shota , Nishimoto Shimpei , Yoneda Ryuki , Nishikawa Kaoru , Yoshida Daisuke
Published: January 2023

Machine learning has been successfully applied in various field but whether it is a viable tool for determining the distance to molecular clouds in the Galaxy is an open question. In the Galaxy, the kinematic distance is commonly employed to represent the distance to a molecular cloud. However, for the inner Galaxy, two different solutions, i.e., the “Near” solution and the “Far” solution, can be derived simultaneously. We attempt to construct a two-class (“Near” or “Far”) inference model using a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is a form of deep learning that can capture spatial features generally. In this study, we use the CO dataset in the first quadrant of the Galactic plane obtained with the Nobeyama 45 m radio telescope (l = 62°–10°, |b| < 1°). In the model, we apply the three-dimensional distribution (position–position–velocity) of the 12CO (J = 1–0) emissions as the main input. To train the model, a dataset with “Near” or “Far” annotation was created from the H ii region catalog of the infrared astronomy satellite WISE. Consequently, we construct a CNN model with a $76\% $ accuracy rate on the training dataset. Using the proposed model, we determine the distance to the molecular clouds identified by the CLUMPFIND algorithm. We found that the mass of molecular clouds with a distance of <8.15 kpc identified in the 12CO data follows a power-law distribution with an index of approximately −2.3 in the mass range M > 103 M⊙. In addition, the detailed molecular gas distribution of the Galaxy, as seen from the Galactic North pole, was determined.