8 Culture, Evil, and Horror

A bstract .   This chapter develops a concept of aesthetic and existential horror and suggests its importance for understanding modern and postmodern culture. It makes three distinct claims. First, the experience of horror signifies a breakdown in the symbolic categories and valuations of a culture. Second, this experience has ontological significance because in horror the human is exposed to the naked fact of being. This latter point is derived from Heidegger's comments on anxiety and Emmanuel Levinas's notion of the " il y a " or "there is." A third claim follows from these two, namely, that horror is distinct from evil. Evil is defined within a cultural matrix; horror is the undefined other of a culture. Evil represents the negation of being; horror shows the sickening presence of being as being. The essay concludes with a reflection on the possibility of a postmodern ethics that takes responsibility for the "horrors of being" generated by globalization.     

Market-oriented product innovation at Høyang Polaris and Jøtul

This report is concerned with an action research project on market oriented product innovation at Høyang Polaris and Jøtul, where a system for assessment of user needs has been planned and implemented. Based on experience from the project, a model has been developed for the introduction of a need assessment system comprising problem analysis, planning, information, training, demonstration, application, and development.The introduction of need assessment methods may be handled as an operational problem or treated as a strategic issue. When handled as an operational problem, systematic need assessment can be introduced as a project or treated as a process integrated with the daily activities of the product innovation staff.The practical operation of a need assessment system in product innovation projects involves definition of a target group, selection of one or several need assessment methods, implementation of the study, and formulation of the need specification.The responsibility for need assessment studies may be assigned to a special staff unit or to the employees participating in the product innovation process.     

鸡尾酒经济（连载8）

第九篇做人很开心 张静章讲话像炮击一般,一句句话在空中炸开. 我在这炮火连天中,接受宁波北仑农村普通话的洗礼. 他那宁波普通话还夹杂很多外国公司或外国老板的名字,这种非常农民又非常全球化的特色语言,宁波北仑之外的中国人听不懂,中国以外的外国人听不懂,北仑的农民也听不懂.     

Raising the bar (8)

This editorial summarizes the papers published in issue 13(3) so as to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends. The first paper challenges the home market hypothesis that large countries host more firms relative to their size than small countries by considering the lobbying activities of multinational firms. The second paper analyzes the implications of a spatial weight matrix used to estimate a spatial econometric model that depends on an endogenous economic variable. By adding a spatial context, the third paper provides a novel contribution to the literature on international norms in de facto measures of human rights performance. The fourth paper examines the determinants of accepting informal work in Poland. The fifth paper deals with non-stationarity and cointegration in a dynamic spatial econometric panel data model when the number of observations in the time – rather than in the cross-sectional– domain tends to infinity.