bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Comparative Law and Critical Legal Studies
Authors: Mattei Ugo
Published: February 2013

The contribution of Critical Legal Studies to comparative law is a matter of considerable international interest, not only in light of the remarkable presence of the movement in several leading US-American academic institutions but also in view of the rather desperate need for comparative law as an academic discipline for theoretical revision and reorientation. This article examines the contributions Critical Legal Studies has really made to comparative law, and how original they are. First, it describes the emergence, as well as some of the work, of Critical Legal Studies in terms of comparative law. Second, it pursues to what extent the Critical Legal Studies approach breaks with, or rather continues, the agenda of the discipline's mainstream. Third, it presents a sympathetic analysis of the critique, evaluating the actual political and scholarly contribution of the Critical Legal Studies approach to comparative law.
Comparative Family Law
Authors: Krause Harry D.
Published: February 2013

Greatly increased mobility of individuals and families has resulted in a growing number of transnational family-law disputes. These have spawned a proliferation of international legal instruments dealing with marriage, divorce, maintenance, child support, and child custody. Of necessity, lawyers and scholars now confront a wide range of questions relating to the conflicts and confluence of legal systems in family law. This article provides a brief history of comparative family law. It examines the great debates in family law, such as failed marriages and child support; downgrading marriage and upgrading cohabitation alternatives; civil marriage versus religious tradition; the state's secular interest in civil marriage; same-sex relationships; assisted reproduction; and contraception and abortion.
Comparative Labour Law
Authors: Finkin Matthew W.
Published: February 2013

This article proceeds in four stages. First, it takes up the emergence of labour law and its comparative offspring as a discipline. Second, it provides a crude taxonomy of comparative labour law scholarship. Third, it treats the role comparativism has played in the development of national labour policy from the nineteenth century to the present. Fourth, and to come full circle, it situates the comparative study with respect to the contemporary quandary of labour law as a discipline. Comparative labour law was born fast upon the construction of labour law as a subject of instruction and academic study. Even from the beginning, however, it was far from clear what labour law was. Today, that question has recrudesced: labour law is a discipline in search of an identity and, to some, a future. Consequently, attention rightly turns first to the root of which comparative study is a branch.
Comparative Civil Procedure
Authors: Zekoll Joachim
Published: February 2013

Procedural law, and civil procedure in particular, was long neglected by comparative scholars. Perceived as painstaking, ministerial, and ultimately boring, the subject was dreaded by students and avoided by professors who had higher aspirations. This article first examines the attempts to categorize and label procedural systems, an impulse that many comparatists should resist. The focus then shifts to procedural harmonization, a term that encompasses a number of topics of increasing importance to proceduralists. After illustrating the dynamics and results of regional and supra-regional harmonization initiatives, the discussion looks at trends towards harmonization through private rule making and at principles that determine the scope of, and limits to, procedural harmonization. The last section addresses the growing concern about access to justice, specifically cost considerations and claim aggregation techniques, which prompt the somewhat related questions of whether and to what extent one legal system can borrow procedural rules from another one.
Prenatal development and the phylogeny and ontogeny of music
Authors: Parncutt Richard
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on musically relevant psychological aspects of prenatal development: the development of perception, cognition, and emotion; the relationships between them; and the musical and musicological implications of those relationships. It begins by surveying relevant foetal sensory abilities: hearing, the vestibular sense of balance and acceleration, and the proprioceptive sense of body orientation and movement. All those senses are relevant for musical development, since in all known cultures music is inseparable from bodily movement and gesture, whether real or implied. The article then considers what sounds and other stimuli are available to the foetus: what patterns are the earliest to be perceptually learnt? It examines psychological and philosophical issues of foetal attention, ‘consciousness’, learning, and memory. The article closes with speculations about the possible role of prenatal development in the phylogeny of musical behaviours.
Children as creative thinkers in music
Authors: Webster Peter R.
Published: February 2013

The study of creative thinking in music involves a complex combination of cognitive and affective variables, often executed at the highest levels of human thinking and feeling. This is such a complicated set of long-term engagements (composition, repeated music listening, or decisions about previously composed music in performance) or ‘in the moment’ engagements (improvisation and one-time listening), that it becomes quickly apparent why this field has not attracted more music researchers and why many feel the topic is hopelessly impregnable. However, the changes in education and the role of music in formal learning demands that we address creative thinking as best we can. This article takes a decidedly ‘teaching and learning’ approach in summarizing the many studies on creative thinking in music. While it is generally acknowledged that children's creative thinking in music occurs as part of many music experiences such as listening, performance, conducting, and improvising, the focus here is on composition.
Socio-emotional development in Chinese children
Authors: Chen Xinyin
Published: February 2013

Developmental researchers have observed considerable individual differences in children's socio-emotional functioning. Whereas some children are sociable and cooperative and tend to engage in positive social interactions, others exhibit hostile and defiant behaviours. In the past twenty years, socio-emotional development in Chinese children has received increased attention from researchers in psychology, anthropology, and health science. This article focuses mainly on two fundamental dimensions of socio-emotional functioning, social initiative and control, and the social behaviours that are formed based upon different key dimensions. It discusses some theoretical issues and a conceptual framework concerning culture and socio-emotional development. It also takes on the works on Chinese children's dispositional characteristics in the early years and socio-emotional functioning in childhood and adolescence, mainly from a cross-cultural perspective. Furthermore, it reviews the findings of the studies conducted to examine the implications of macro-level social, economic, and cultural changes in China for socialization and children's socio-emotional functioning.
Parenting and child socialization in contemporary China
Authors: Wang Qian , Chang Lei
Published: February 2013

The ostensible peculiarities, as well as similarities, of parenting and child socialization in China vis-à-vis Western countries such as the United States have been capturing intellectual curiosity and creating debate among investigators over the past few decades. Drawing on relatively recent empirical research in three major Chinese societies (mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), this article attempts to depict a state-of-the-art picture of parenting and child socialization in contemporary China. It examines the growing body of research conducted with children in urban areas of mainland China, given that they constitute a substantial proportion of the youth population in contemporary Chinese societies. Furthermore, it takes on questions such as how do Western frameworks characterizing parenting and child socialization apply in China, a culture commonly believed to be interdependence-oriented, in contrast to many Western cultures? And, what are the notions of parenting and child socialization indigenous to Chinese culture?
Illness behaviors among the Chinese
Authors: Mak Winnie W. S. , Chen Sylvia Xiaohua
Published: February 2013

Illness is an individual's subjective meaning and interpretation of the disease in his or her social context, whereas disease is referred to as the biological pathology or malfunctioning that requires medical or professional attention. This article focuses on how culture may influence the illness behaviours of Chinese. Illness behaviour includes the way people experience, interpret, and cope with the disease. People experience their physical and emotional states based on their sociocultural background and familial socialization. Cultural experiences also structure and shape people's value orientations and behavioural styles. As this article states, to understand better the mechanisms of distress of Chinese and to provide them with culturally competent services, the distress experience of the Chinese around the world must be understood from their cultural perspective. The examination of issues related to illness behaviours of Chinese is carried out focusing on empirical studies conducted in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America.
Developments in understanding Chinese leadership: paternalism and its elaborations, moderations, and alternatives
Authors: Chen Chao C. , Farh Jiing-Lih
Published: February 2013

China has been steadily integrating into the world economy, exerting as well as receiving influence over these last few decades. There have been abundant writings on leadership, government, and management in Chinese social, philosophical, and political classics. Chinese leadership theory and empirical research has taken leaps and bounds over this same time period. Leadership in Chinese organizations is a complex phenomenon, which includes both culturally universal (etic) and culturally specific (emic) aspects. This article seeks to take stock of the developments and progress in Chinese leadership theory and research approaching it from both etic and emic perspectives. It starts with some indigenous Chinese thoughts on leadership and analyzes how these foundational thoughts get elaborated into theoretical models of leadership and how these models fare from the perspectives of other Chinese and Western leadership theories that have been employed to study Chinese leadership phenomena.
There are homes at the four corners of the seas: acculturation and adaptation of overseas Chinese
Authors: Ward Colleen , En-Yi Lin
Published: February 2013

The number of overseas Chinese has now reached 35 million, making them the largest migrant group in the world. That makes the question “how Chinese acculturate and adapt to new environments?” increasingly important in the global arena. This article examines acculturation and adaptation in overseas Chinese. It focuses primarily on the experiences of Chinese sojourners and immigrants, but also makes some reference to those Chinese who are members of established ethnic communities in culturally diverse societies. It describes the dynamics of acculturation in Chinese families. In contrast to Chinese culture (which is collectivistic, family-oriented, and relational), most destination countries for Chinese immigrants embrace individualistic values where individual rights and needs take priority over the needs of the group and family. As a result, upon arriving in their new host countries, Chinese immigrants are faced with the complicated task of balancing loyalty to their family.
Categorial Grammar
Authors: Morrill Glyn
Published: February 2013

In categorial grammar, expressions are classified by structured types. The set of types is the recursive closure of a set of atomic types under a number of type-constructors, so that types are algebraic terms like arithmetic expressions or logical formulas. The rules of categorical grammar are supposed to express the laws obeyed by the types according to the ‘meaning’ of the type-constructors. A set of such rules forms a deductive system or logical calculus. A categorial grammar consists of a system of types, a calculus for those types, and a lexicon that is an assignment of types to basic expressions. The language thereby defined consists of the expressions derivable from the lexicon by the calculus. In the purest form of categorial grammar, the calculus would express all and only the laws of the types, and would be universal. This chapter discusses the following: Lambek calculus, basic discontinuous Lambek calculus, syntactic structures as proof nets, categorial semantics, and quantifier scoping and quantifier scope preference.
Corpus-Based and Corpus-driven Analyses of Language Variation and Use
Authors: Biber Douglas
Published: February 2013

Corpus linguistics is a research approach that has developed over the past few decades to support empirical investigations of language variation and use, resulting in research findings which have much greater generalizability and validity than would otherwise be feasible. Corpus studies have used two major research approaches: ‘corpus-based’ and ‘corpus-driven’. Corpus-based research assumes the validity of linguistic forms and structures derived from linguistic theory. The primary goal of research is to analyse the systematic patterns of variation and use for those pre-defined linguistic features. Corpus-driven research is more inductive, so that the linguistic constructs themselves emerge from analysis of a corpus. This chapter illustrates the kinds of analyses and perspectives on language use possible from both corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches.
Formal Generative Typology
Authors: Baker Mark C.
Published: February 2013

This chapter describes an approach to linguistic research called Formal Generative Typology (FGT). FGT is a pragmatic and somewhat eclectic approach that is built on the idea of combining a generative-style toleration for abstractness in analysis with a typology-inspired interest in testing claims over a sample of unrelated languages. This appears to be a powerful combination, with the potential to greatly advance the quest for answers to questions about what is truly universal to natural human languages, what can vary, and whether the variation is patterned or not.
Word Grammar
Authors: Hudson Richard
Published: February 2013

This chapter begins with a brief history of Word Grammar. It then discusses categories in a network; the logic of inheritance; the architecture of language; words, features, and agreement; morphology; syntax; semantics; learning and using language; and sociolinguistics.
Chronic Illness and Disease History
Authors: Timmermann Carsten
Published: February 2013

This article discusses that with a new focus on patients and the quality of care, illness experiences have become an important topic in recent years in scholarly and biographical literature, but also in the wider world of newspaper, inviting comparisons with nineteenth-century accounts of consumptive lives and deaths. This article is about continuities of consumption and tuberculosis and the historical change that has obscured them. It discusses the belief in medical progress and its power, informed by laboratory research in bacteriology and physiology, replacing the feeling of impotence characterizing earlier medical encounters with incurability. It further suggests that the continuities with consumption go beyond descriptions, shaping the ways in which we deal with chronic illness today. It concludes with reasons for the use of comparative accounts to balance the dominance of the American case in the historiography and also histories of chronic illness in the developing world.
Medicine and the Mind
Authors: Hayward Rhodri
Published: February 2013

History maintains an ambiguous role with regard to the mind sciences. It can be used to demonstrate the universality of psychological characteristics, capacities, and illnesses or it can serve to demonstrate their relative bases by revealing the implicit assumptions that guide modern research as well as the specific configurations of theory, practice, and technology that allowed the mind sciences to emerge and their subject-matter to be articulated. This article embraces this second approach. It outlines four broad constructions of the psyche — the inscribable, the historical, the adaptable, and the statistical — and shows how their articulation has made possible new kinds of self-understanding and social interaction. It also makes broad claims for the universal basis of psychological phenomena. This discussion focuses on the specific conceptions of mental medicine that have emerged in Europe and North America since the end of the eighteenth century. This psychological language makes possible our modern experience of mind, self, and mental illness.
A New Philosophy of the Market
Authors: Ayache Élie
Published: February 2013

This article attempts to genetically deduce the market from the historical event of the conversion of debt into equity. This event can be related, historically, to the year 1602, when the Dutch created the East India Company – the first joint stock company whose shares almost simultaneously started being exchanged in the ‘street’, subsequently necessitating the creation of the first stock exchange. As such, the morphogenetic process engendering the market is not mediated by the category of probability or possibility. One of the strangest results of our deduction of the market is that we do not come up, as expected, with equity (or stock) as the consequence of the conversion of debt into equity, but directly with the contingent claim. In the logic of our deduction, the contingent claim precedes the notion of exchange and market, and precedes the notion of price. It precedes them only just, because the exchange and the market and the price will also be deduced in one and the same movement. The idea is that, insofar as the contingent claim is the direct result of the conversion, it cannot but get carried along by its own momentum and subsequently produce the market and become translated into price. Insofar as it results from the conversion of debt, the contingent claim is the exchange is the market.
The Education of Neo-Assyrian Princes
Authors: Zamazalová Silvie
Published: February 2013

This article examines the education of Neo-Assyrian princes, focusing on Neo-Assyrian King Assurbanipal. It explains that Assurbanipal was the eldest son of King Esarhaddon and his rise to power began in 672 bc when he replaced his elder brother Sin-nadin-apli as crown prince of Assyria. This article draws on a broad range of additional sources from the Sargonid period to a more balanced picture and place Assurbanipal's learnedness in a wider historical context. It discusses Assurbanipal's education according to a royal inscription and describes his performance in the royal lion hunt which was a test and demonstration of the ruler's fitness for kingship.
Judicial Decision-Making: Judges and Arbitrators
Authors: Démare‐Lafont Sophie
Published: February 2013

This article examines judicial decision-making in ancient Mesopotamia. It explains that the Mesopotamian perception of justice combined the notions of stability and straightness and it was intended to reproduce cosmic order in the terrestrial world. It describes various people who served as judges and arbitrators. It discusses the individual stages and elements of a trial at court and argues that despite its apparent adversarial nature, Mesopotamian judicial practice was in essence conciliatory.
Sheep and Sky: Systems of Divinatory Interpretation
Authors: Koch Ulla Susanne
Published: February 2013

This article examines the systems of divinatory interpretation in ancient Mesopotamia. Based on the sustained transmission of the tradition as well as the sheer amount of textual evidence, this article suggests that divination must have played an important role in the second and first millennium cuneiform cultures of Babylonia and Assyria. It describes two of the major divinatory disciplines: extispicy and omen astrology as practised at the Neo-Assyrian court in the second quarter of the first millennium bc.
Making Sense of Time: Observational and Theoretical Calendars
Authors: Steele John M.
Published: February 2013

This article describes observational and theoretical calendars in ancient Mesopotamia. Some of the earliest cuneiform sources attest to calendar systems for the reckoning of days for administrative and cultic purposes. There were hemerologies which set out good and bad fortune days throughout the year and astronomical almanacs which contain the length of each month calculated for a coming year. This article suggests that Mesopotamian calendars extended into two other areas of astronomy that provide information on solstices, equinoxes, and the planets.
Tablets of Schools and Scholars: A Portrait of the Old Babylonian Corpus
Authors: Tinney Steve
Published: February 2013

This article describes the Old Babylonia corpus based on evidence from tablets of schools and scholars. It charts both well-established and yet untrodden paths through the realm of Old Babylonian literary and scholarly tablets and evaluates the entire corpus of Old Babylonian literary and learning regardless of language. It highlights the need to conduct more research to elaborate the nature and extent of the relationships between Akkadian and Sumerian corpora, and the mechanics of the transfer of knowledge within southern Babylonia.
Adapting to New Contexts: Cuneiform in Anatolia
Authors: Weeden Mark
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on cuneiform and scribal education in Anatolia. It attempts to trace some of the developments in the corpus of knowledge and training when it let the confines of its initial area of relevance and was received in Anatolia by the Hittites and to draw inferences about the semiotic and sociological context of the wholesale import of a large-scale technocratic apparatus from one culture into another. It discusses the institutional and social context of scribal education in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and suggests that class composition among the Anatolian elite was not necessarily the same as that in Mesopotamia.
Observing and Describing The World Through Divination and Astronomy
Authors: Rochberg Francesca
Published: February 2013

This article examines observation and description of the world through divination and astronomy in ancient Mesopotamian scribal culture. It discusses observation-statements that stand in relation to the omen divination programme and the astronomical observations of the Babylonian Diaries focusing on their relationships and the formation of the empirical foundation of mathematical astronomy. It suggests that the modern reconstruction of the Babylonian mathematical astronomical texts has been of profound significance for the history of science because the foundation of Western astronomy is traceable in those sources.
Bayesian Applications in Marketing
Authors: Rossi Peter , Allenby Greg
Published: February 2013

This article describes various discrete choice models of consumers who may be heterogeneous both in terms of their preferences and in their sensitivities to marketing variables such as price. It addresses a distinct set of challenges that are being posed through the use of hierarchical priors. It considers standard statistical approach that generates discreteness by applying a censoring function to underlying continuous latent variables. This approach generates models that can be employed in situations where more descriptive models are required. Nonparametric and flexible parametric models involving Dirichlet processes and other mixtures are also accepted and favored in marketing. This article outlines several utility specifications that incorporate discreteness and other important aspects of consumer decisions. Computational issues are important when dealing with large marketing data sets and this article discusses on how to implement posterior simulation methods in marketing models.
History ∙ Plays ∙ Genre ∙ Games
Authors: Taylor Gary
Published: February 2013

This article asks: Did Middleton write any history plays? And if he did, are they any good? Behind those sceptical questions lurk two others. ‘What is the history play?’ And is Middleton really ‘our other Shakespeare’? The article suggests that while Middleton did not write history plays the way Shakespeare did, or as often as Shakespeare did, he did write two artful, thoughtful, original history plays – plays as dark and brilliant, as delightful and disturbing, as his comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies. Those histories are important precisely because Middleton sees and shapes the past differently from Shakespeare. If history is indeed a battle between competing books, then analysing the difference between Shakespeare's histories and Middleton's is not just an idle game professors play.
Passionate Tunes For Amorous Poems: Middleton's Way With Music
Authors: Seligmann Raphael
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on Middleton's way with music. Middleton treats music consistently as a ‘thing indifferent’ – good or bad depending on use. This moral agnosticism allows him to concentrate on music's practical value in building (and sometimes disrupting) communities. In Middleton's plays, song performances and comments about music expose complex relationships between characters without pretending to disclose eternal truths. Thus, a singing academy can serve as a front for a brothel in one play, while in another, a prostitute can sing a lute song to show sincere repentance. Music making in Middleton brings people together for business, fighting, love, or sex because it is something that people do and enjoy, and consider important.
‘More Lies Than True Tales’:Scepticism In Middleton'S Mock-Almanacs
Authors: Hand Meredith Molly
Published: February 2013

This article explores the relationship between Middleton's scepticism as it appears in his mock-prognostications, including The Owl's Almanac (1618), and the classical scepticism described in Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, which appeared in translation and was embraced in early modern English culture. Middleton's and Sextus's scepticisms ostensibly differ a great deal. The Pyrrhonist scepticism espoused by Sextus encourages humans to apprehend opposing sides of a debate, or alternative but equally valid perspectives, with equipollence, and to suspend judgement, thus arriving at a state of tranquillity. Middleton's scepticism casts doubt upon dogma and oppressive doctrine and exposes the material reality and socio-economic relations of early modern English culture.
Middleton and the Theatre of Emergency
Authors: Glimp David
Published: February 2013

However much disasters threaten communities, strain them to their limits, or unravel them altogether in the course of any given emergency, disasters also create communities. They can do so in many ways: as a traumatic past event that generates a sense of belonging or attachment to a place, or group, or former state of affairs; as a present reality which brings into clarified focus the structure of collective life and the differentially distributed resources available for survival; or as a future possibility constituting a horizon of governmental reflection and activity, a focus of planning, knowledge production, and programmes of disaster preparedness, risk abatement, or risk management. The power of disaster to sponsor imagined communities was something early modern dramatists and theatrical entrepreneurs knew well, a knowledge embedded in and enacted through the artefacts they produced and from which they sought to turn a profit. Through political catastrophe, playwrights and the theatre companies that sponsored them undertook acts of world making in the paradoxical form of narratives of threatened or realized large-scale destruction. Thomas Middleton participated in this aspect of the Renaissance commercial theatre throughout his career. This article focuses on three of his later plays: The Old Law (1618 or 1619), Hengist, King of Kent (1620), and A Game At Chess (1624). Through close readings of these plays, it works to describe some of the primary resources Middleton employed to create states of emergency on stage, especially resources of plot, characterization, and language.
Middleton and Mimetic Desire
Authors: Engel Lars
Published: February 2013

Thomas Middleton's reputation is at an interesting stage, no longer confined to conversations among academic specialists on early modern drama, but not yet in any settled place in a larger canon of authors whom literate people are meant to know about. This article seeks to contribute to the emergence of a mythic Middleton whom we know to turn to for some particular kind of excellence. This mythic Middleton is a theatre-poet especially good at catching the generation and power of what René Girard has taught us to call mimetic desire: a great poet, that is, of the social energies of rivalry, comic and tragic.
The Emotions Of Tragedy
Authors: Budra Paul
Published: February 2013

The most regularly performed of Thomas Middleton's plays since its revival in 1961 has been The Changeling. The majority of productions, and the ones that received the best reviews, emphasize a romantic relationship between the characters Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores. Literary critics, too, have begun to assume a repressed sexual attraction in Beatrice-Joanna for the radical other of De Flores. Barker and Nicol take exception to this interpretation of the play, finding it questionable on contemporary feminist terms for its erotic treatment of the central scene, in which De Flores demands that Beatrice-Joanna reward his murder of Piracquo with sexual favours, which risks affirming that Middleton and Rowley's heroine actually desires a rape she pleads against in the lines they wrote for her. This article suggests that it is questionable for another reason: this romantic, or at least erotic, reading of the play may be emotionally ahistorical. It arises, at least in part, from an essentialization of the emotional registers of tragedy, a process which resulted from the domination of that dramatic genre by Shakespeare.
‘It's a Whole Different Sex!’: Women Performing Middleton On The Modern Stage
Authors: Bourus Terri
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on five actresses now stretching their Middletonian wings: two from Still's Revenger, one from Berger's, one from Elliot's Women Beware, and a fifth from an earlier promenade production of The Changeling, directed by Joanna Reed. Anyone interested in Middleton's art and Middleton's women can learn a lot from Barbara Flynn, Katherine Manners, Liv Rooth, Harriet Walter, and Louise Yates: five actresses, at very different stages in their careers, playing five very different roles in four very different productions on three very different stages.
‘The Lure Of A Taffeta Cloak’: Middleton's Sartorial Seduction in Your Five Gallants
Authors: Bly Mary
Published: February 2013

This article explores Middleton's Your Five Gallants. Your Five Gallants is manifestly a post-sumptuary law play, one obsessed with the effect and pleasure of wearing sumptuous clothing – but also with the difficulty of recognizing degree. It is torn between a depiction of the delights of sartorial splendour and acknowledgement that there is little besides the hidden quality of ‘blood’ which divides a husbandman from a nobleman. This is why the play opens with Frippery rather than Katherine. Most romantic comedies track illicit love affairs, but the focus here is on newly licit objects of desire, and its erotically invested encounters are not between women and men, but between bodies and fabric.
Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’
Authors: Stone Dan
Published: February 2013

Seventy years after the start of World War II, revisionists across Europe are arguing that Joseph Stalin was as much to blame for starting the war as was Adolf Hitler. As Adam Krzeminski rightly says, World War II is still being fought. This article sees ‘collective memory’ as a set of representations of the past that are constructed by a given social group (be it a nation, a family, a religious community, or other) through a process of invention, appropriation, and selection, and which have bearings on relationships of power within society. ‘Memory’ here refers not only to the academic study of memory but primarily to the various manifestations of ‘memory politics’ that have characterised Europe since the end of the Cold War. It is worth situating these European memory wars in a broader context, since they occur worldwide, especially in societies scarred by civil war, genocide, and authoritarianism, such as post-apartheid South Africa, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Argentina.
Africa and The Global Lives of Things
Authors: Prestholdt Jeremy
Published: February 2013

Inquiries into commodification, social distinction, and fashion have offered fresh perspectives on social relations and cultural formations in Africa. Imported consumer goods were both elemental to social relationships and a cornerstone of Africa's global interfaces. This article explores how the social dynamics of consumer demand in Africa were shaped by, and gave shape to, larger social, economic, and political relationships from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. This approach underscores the interrelation of African cultural imperatives and histories of globalization. Focusing on East Africa in the late nineteenth century, the article begins with a snapshot of consumer trends before the nineteenth century. It then examines three dimensions of consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: marketing consumer objects, the social relations of consumption, and the ways manufacturers accommodated African consumer demand. Taken together, these themes augment our understanding of social change in Africa, contribute to wider reflections on consumption as a mode of trans-societal relation, and highlight how manufactured objects can be conceptually and physically transformed throughout their global life cycles.
Things Under Socialism: The Soviet Experience
Authors: Fitzpatrick Sheila
Published: February 2013

The unequal distribution of things was one of the basic iniquities of capitalism. Coupled with confidence in future abundance was the recognition that, for the short term, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and before the ‘building of socialism’ had been completed, things might be tough and goods scarce. So the immediate Revolutionary task was to ensure that those who had formerly been poor in goods became rich, and vice versa. The challenge for the Soviet Union was how to successfully accomplish that redistribution. The new phrase of Revolution – Joseph Stalin's ‘revolution from above’ – was a state-initiated great leap forward on the economic front, involving a rapid industrialization drive, collectivization of peasant agriculture, abolition of private trade in the towns, and the introduction of central economic planning. This article focuses on things under socialism in the Soviet Union and considers scarcity and privilege, the rediscovery of good taste, the promises of abundance under Nikita Khrushchev, Eastern Europe and ‘socialist modernity’, and access to Western goods after the collapse of communism.
Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture
Authors: Burke Timothy
Published: February 2013

Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.
Personality testing on the internet
Authors: Buchanan Tom
Published: February 2013

This article provides an overview of some of the key issues in online personality assessment, offers practical advice for people planning to use such tests in research or applied settings, and highlights some priorities for future research. As well as personality inventories, it considers other forms of self-report-questionnaire-based psychological assessment that may reflect relatively stable individual differences but not strictly fall into traditional models of personality. For example, these are considered in the discussion of equivalence between online and offline tests, because it is likely that any psychological processes affecting the completion of online personality tests (e.g., increased self-disclosure) will be shared with these instruments as well. In terms of methodology, if not the constructs being measured, there are strong similarities that will inform discussion of issues such as equivalence. The same is true of research on online survey methodology – again, there are valuable lessons to be learned from that body of literature.
Using Online Panels in Psychological Research
Authors: Göritz Anja S.
Published: February 2013

Online panels (OPs) are an important form of web-based data collection, as illustrated by their widespread use. In the classical sense, a panel is a longitudinal study in which the same information is collected from the same individuals at different points in time. In contrast to that, an OP has come to denote a pool of registered people who have agreed to occasionally take part in web-based studies. Thus with OPs, the traditional understanding of a panel as a longitudinal study is broadened because an OP can be employed as a sampling source for both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. This article gives an overview of the current state of use of OPs. It discusses what OPs are, what type of OPs there are, how OPs work from a technological point of view, and what their advantages and disadvantages are. The article reviews the current body of methodological findings on doing research with OPs. Based on this evidence, recommendations are given as to how the quality of data that are collected in OPs can be augmented.
A Global Diaspora
Authors: Devine T. M.
Published: February 2013

In 2010, the Scottish government announced a ‘Diaspora Engagement Plan’ outlining an ambitious strategy for connecting with Scots emigrants overseas. The Scottish diaspora of the last 700 years or more has had several distinctive features. While it has been suggested that, by the later twentieth century, an estimated 15 million people of Scottish descent lived outside Scotland, the longevity of Scottish emigration, stretching back to the thirteenth century, might indicate that the estimate could still err on the conservative side. Considerable outward movement from Scotland, often on a substantial scale, occurred from the 1400s through to the 1990s. This article examines the Scottish experience of emigration, focusing on the great migrations between c.1830 and c.1939 and the reasons for movement. It also looks at the more recent outward movement since 1945.
The Early Modern Family
Authors: Ewan Elizabeth
Published: February 2013

Clan and family ties are among the most recognized aspects of ‘Scottishness’ around the world. But what do we know about the historic Scottish family, as opposed to images largely based on nineteenth-century traditions? Perhaps because of the popularity of clan roots among modern diaspora Scots and the resulting association with ‘tartanism’, most historians have tended to focus their research elsewhere. While family history has flourished in those other areas since the 1980s, Scottish studies, especially of the pre-modern family, have only recently begun to appear, despite earlier calls for such work. This article explores the family in early modern Scotland, focusing on the nuclear family unit of parents and children. It also examines the family's place in the wider context of kinship and society, and considers illegitimacy, divorce, marriage and marriage litigation, domestic abuse, and women's history.
The Stateless Nation and the British State since 1918
Authors: Cameron Ewen A.
Published: February 2013

The important role of the state in Scottish history since 1918 can be partly explained by historical forces arising from the speed of Scotland's economic development in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century attempts to deal with the legacies of this process. These problems were too profound to be dealt with by private enterprise; only the mobilization of the resources of the state could eradicate the slums or improve the health of the nation. However, there is a problem in attempting to understand the state in a Scottish context. There is no doubt that sovereignty and authority are located at a United Kingdom level, even in a post-devolution context. Suggestions of Scottish autonomy or semi-independence are cultural or political, rather than constitutional or legal. This article discusses the links between the role of the state and the operation of the Union in Scotland since 1918. Although aspects of this topic – housing, economic development, the regeneration of the Highlands, education – have attracted a great deal of attention, there are big questions that remain to be examined by new research.
Hedonic Price Analysis in Food Markets
Authors: Costanigro Marco , Mccluskey Jill J.
Published: February 2013

This article presents the basic theory of hedonic modeling, its empirical application and relevance, and the principal limitations and challenges. Agricultural economists have long utilized the hedonic price relationship, and the hedonic price technique has been utilized to estimate the implicit prices of attributes for numerous food products. It provides a framework of the hedonic models that can be used to quantify the long-term effects of exogenous shocks on quality, or implementation of regulatory policies. This article discusses the whole armamentarium of econometric models and methods familiar to applied economists, including parametric, semi-parametric, and non-parametric approaches. The objective is to describe briefly each econometric model within the hedonic context and provide an understanding of the implications and trade-offs inherent to the choice of each alternative. This is a fruitful area of research with increased customization of products and the increasing availability of large data sets.
Non-Market Valuation: Stated Preference Methods
Authors: Carlsson Fredrik
Published: February 2013

The purpose of this article is to give a detailed description of the steps involved in designing a choice experiment and analyzing the responses. It also discusses a number of behavioral aspects of stated preference surveys, with an emphasis on hypothetical bias. It briefly presents the underlying economic model that is used to analyze discrete choices. The main idea of a choice experiment is often to estimate the welfare effects of changes in attributes. The article discusses the three important parts of the design of a stated preference survey, namely, definition of attributes and attribute levels, experimental design, and survey context, behavioral aspects, and validity tests. This article discusses the incentive properties of different choice formats, then looks at the empirical evidence on hypothetical bias, and finally at methods for reducing hypothetical bias. It mentions the importance of social context where the decision maker is not one single individual.
Consumer Demand in Vertically Differentiated Markets
Authors: Giannakas Konstantinos
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on the analysis of consumer demand in markets for vertically differentiated products—markets where quality is the main differentiating attribute of the goods involved. The objective is to provide an overview of the analysis of consumer demand in vertically differentiated markets, the standard assumptions employed in the literature, and the relevance and ramifications of some key assumptions for the analysis of food product markets. The article presents a general model of vertical product differentiation and derives the consumer demands for, and market shares of, the different products, as well as measures of consumer surplus for the different consumer groups involved. The discussion then focuses on alternative model formulations derived through different assumptions employed in the analysis. The assumptions employed can have important ramifications for the equilibrium variety and the structure of different supply channels. Finally, this article discusses some important issues that can be addressed using this methodological framework.
Consumer Demand and Welfare in Equilibrium Displacement Models
Authors: Wohlgenant Michael K.
Published: February 2013

The scope and value of the equilibrium displacement models (EDM) methodology in consumer demand and welfare analysis is extensive. This article reviews the basic elements of the model. It discusses different applications of the models in the literature that show the utility of the approach. The major forms of the EDM and implications for consumer demand and welfare are highlighted. An important question when using the EDM to generate results for changes in prices, quantities, and surplus values is how sensitive are the results to alternative plausible values of the partial elasticities of the demand/supply equations. It then turns at last to issues related to statistical precision and approximation errors. It concludes with the discussion of modifications and extensions that are likely to be made.
Economic Development, Government Policies, and Food Consumption
Authors: Masters William A.
Published: February 2013

This article addresses the influence of economic development and government policies on food consumption around the world. It shows how an underlying process of economic development and policy change might drive changes in food consumption. It analyzes the interacting influences in a unified framework that could help explain both diversities and similarities. To help make sense of the diverse literature and disparate facts about food consumption changes and differences across countries, this article offers a series of thought experiments about individual decision-making in economic development. It then moves directly to the evidence presented on food prices as influenced by government policies, and on households' actual food consumption choices. The economics approach to food consumption aims to explain our diverse choices in terms of a common decision-making process.
Food Standards and International Trade
Authors: Sheldon Ian
Published: February 2013

The focus of this article is on the interaction between standards and international trade. The objective is to explore in more detail two different aspects of international trade and standards based on resolution of either a public goods or an asymmetric information problem. The article develops a general equilibrium setting and draws extensively on existing work in the trade and environmental economics literature and examines the role of labeling standards in maximizing the gains from international economic integration. This analysis is designed to capture some key stylized facts and basic hypotheses concerning North–South trade where standards and technical regulations are targeted at negative externalities in food production. Finally, it draws some conclusions concerning potential future research on food standards and international trade.