浅析城市设计

城市设计不同于城市规划,大约30多年前,成为一个体系完善的学科。在后现代城市设计的反射下,环境质量与用户需求的问题日显突出。因此关于这方面已经有很多的辩论,最近关于城市设计的未来作出了更好的结论。本文将着重在三个重要的辩论。首先,对城市设计的兴起加以分析。然后将讨论在后现代背景下的城市设计中的作用。其次,城市设计与城市规划之间的异同和与与后现代主义之间的关系。最后,阐述未来的城市设计将会以现代都市生活的主题为指导。     

Product waste in the automotive industry: Technology and environmental management

In this article the changes in technology and industry structure forced by waste management in the automotive industry are explored. The analysis is based on (1) a characterisation of corporate response to environmental issues, and (2) the management of technology applied to the car manufacturing industry. It is argued that a more elaborate view of company reactions to governmental regulation of environmental issues has developed in recent years. Companies respond with pro-active strategies. Because of this active attitude environmental concerns influence other aspects of company policy, such as the management of technology. New strategies emerge which are not only a response to environmental problems, but might also influence the industrial structure for the future. The analysis is not only relevant for the automotive industry, but for other manufacturing industries as well. Government action puts waste management issues on the agenda of an increasing number of manufacturing firms that have to develop solutions for these in close cooperation with their suppliers and customers.     

Simulating mining policies in developing countries: The case of Colombia

Mining represents an important economic sector in almost all countries, especially the developing ones. The planning in this area is complex due to the interaction between different aspects like economic factors, environmental and social issues, and government regulation. A tool for policy analysis is needed to understand and test the effects of new and existing policies and avoid unanticipated side effects. The article develops a generic model for analyzing the mining sector of a country and demonstrates how it can be calibrated to test a set of alternative scenarios for the future of mining in Colombia.     

The Urban,Politics and Subject Formation

In contrast to more traditional debates about voting patterns, local versus state administrations, and individual rights and participatory democracy, this article addresses the question of urban politics through an analysis of subject formation. By taking subject formation as the analytical focus, research questions about ‘politics’ shift from traditional ones about local or state government and the development of consensus, for instance, to ones about the constitution of subjects who are governed and govern themselves in particular ways. Using the emergence of two increasingly commonplace subject forms in contemporary China — urban professionals and volunteers — as examples, the article considers how modes of self‐regulation become political problems and also how subjects may be of the urban as well as located in the urban. The problematizations of socialist state planning have led to new governmental rationalities and technologies that not only produced new subject positions, but also new urban spaces, landscapes, economies and lifestyles. From this view, the article is an intervention into discussions about the ‘where’ of urban politics. It also argues that it is critical to examine politics as problematization and normalization if we are to understand what is at stake in the constitution of potential ‘communities of action’.     

Employment equity in Canada and South Africa: progress and propositions

In 1998 the South African government attempted to redress historical workplace discrimination through the introduction of the Employment Equity Act, largely modelled on the Canadian legislation. This paper provides a background to the rationale for employment equity and related practices in both Canada and South Africa. Policies and practices are compared and progress achieved thus far in both countries is discussed. Suggestions for future consideration by South African policy makers and business leaders are proposed that include issues that are more difficult to legislate, yet which will determine the optimal progress of employment equity in South Africa. The issues highlighted in this regard pertain to top management commitment, the development of holistic human resources policies and practices, the appreciation and management of employee diversity and the creation of inclusive organizational cultures that address historical systemic discrimination.     

Trends in sustainability reporting by the Fortune Global 250

Against the background of critique on the negative social and environmental implications of globalization, multinational enterprises have become active in reporting on activities undertaken to prevent these ‘externalities’ of international trade and production. This article analyses to what extent and in what form the trend towards non‐financial reporting, which started in the 1990s, has continued in the 21st century. It presents both trend and panel data of the Fortune Global 250 in 1998 and 2001, showing a continued and significant rise of sustainability reporting to approximately half of these multinationals, with some sector and country variations. One‐third of the reports are externally verified. Especially in Europe and Japan, the ‘sustained’ nature of sustainability reporting is accompanied by regulatory requirements and government encouragements. The number of reports that includes social (and sometimes also financial) issues has increased considerably. The article also shows that in these reports the more ‘traditional’ topics, on the environment, corporate philanthropy and employees, receive much more attention than the broader external societal issues. It concludes with a reflection on the extent to which current forms of disclosure might address the concerns raised about multinationals' behaviour. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Futures of Crisis,Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

Coastal megacities across Asia have experienced devastating floods in recent years. Studies project dramatic increases in populations prone to chronic flooding and potential permanent inundation of densely populated urban areas in future decades. The uncertainties presented by future flood risks disrupt prevalent state visions of globalization‐driven prosperity. The emerging reality of a shift in relationship between water and urban settlements has begun driving recalibration of power relations around a range of issues, including longstanding contestations over infrastructure delivery, housing, land rights and political representation. Flood mitigation efforts have played out in debates over displacement and eviction, and distributional concerns about the costs and benefits of these initiatives. This article develops a conceptual framework for assessing the implications of projections of flood risk for urban political theory. The article begins by identifying political contestations that emerge around the varied ways water intersects with urban processes—through dynamics of permeability, flow and drainage, aquifers and pipes, and coastal defense. It then explores how projections of the crisis of flooding have reshaped three contemporary debates in urban politics: those around property rights and the question of ‘informality’; around neoliberalization and financialization; and around the rescaling of the state. Finally, it briefly deploys this framework to examine the case of Jakarta.     

Fundraising for regional environmental issues: Public perceptions of who is financially responsible for the local environment

Environmental nonprofit organizations attract less than 5 % of total philanthropic giving. Given the seriousness of the environmental challenges facing the globe, it is imperative to identify barriers to and best practices in soliciting environmental giving. Past studies have identified the difficulty in soliciting funding for macro-level environmental concerns or for concerns considered to be public goods; however, little research has been conducted about giving to regional environmental concerns. Our research questions were as follows: (a) from what type of sources do residents believe environmental protection for regional environmental concerns should be funded?; (b) how willing are residents to contribute financially to regional environmental concerns?; and (c) to what extent do residents trust nonprofit organizations to address regional environmental concerns? We surveyed Florida residents (n = 548) about the conservation of the Ocklawaha River and the breaching of the Rodman Reservoir, an area with pressing environmental concerns and heavily frequented for economic and recreational use. Findings suggest that (a) participants believe government agencies, not nonprofits, should fund restoration projects, (b) participants trust nonprofits more than government to accomplish restoration goals, and (c) participants are more interested in contributing via taxes than via donations. Considerations for fundraising are discussed.     

Analysing emission intensive firms as regulatory stakeholders: a role for adaptable business strategy

Climate change regulations pose significant challenges to firms that produce large volumes of carbon emissions. Accordingly, firms in the trade‐exposed emission intensive industries are critical regulatory stakeholders. Following the Australian Government's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2007, the proposed installation of an emission trading scheme is one of several business concerns as the government seeks to implement climate change policies and regulations. In this study, we inve stigate some of the major concerns that confront emission intensive businesses, and ask what the critical issues are for firms as a consequence of climate change policy implementation and what this means for their strategies. The study uses a concept mapping and analysis technique to reveal that future emission trading systems and business performance impacts resulting from emission reduction initiatives represent serious strategic concerns to stakeholder firms. Adaptable business strategies offer a potential solution to these perceived concerns and problems. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Climate Change Adaptive Capacity in Santiago de Chile: Creating a Governance Regime for Sustainability Planning

For most urban areas, the challenges of adaptation are as urgent as those of mitigation. This is particularly the case where adaptive capacity is weak, particularly in low‐ and middle‐income countries, and the benefits of global mitigation in the short term will be experienced beyond 2050. A focus on adaptive capacity‐building in these vulnerable settings is imperative. Much of the emphasis in climate change since the early 1990s has been on basic science and how public policy should respond to it; less attention has been paid to the governance implications and connections with wider development processes. This article explores the governance challenges of adaptation in the Santiago Metropolitan Region. It points to weaknesses in the water and energy sectors, which have highly sectoral, horizontally unintegrated institutional structures and instruments that pose significant challenges for adaptation. Such cases point to the need to engage with both the wider planning concerns of existing development strategies and the basic elements of transdisciplinarity, finance and human capital‐building, in order to forge a more integrated adaptation response. Without an engagement with the governance issue and wider debates around metropolitan planning and socioeconomic development, it is unlikely the response will move beyond a limited physical infrastructure investment programme.     

我国农业支持政策的绿色生态转型研究——基于中日韩三国的比较分析

为了更有针对性地推进我国农业支持政策的绿色生态转型,进而加快实现农业绿色发展,本文选取可比性强、借鉴价值较大的日韩两国为参照,并在农业支持情况、绿色发展水平和未来政策改革的空间等多方面进行了中日韩三国比较。研究发现,相较于日韩两国,我国的农业支持存在总量不足、结构不合理等问题,导致我国农业支持政策的环保导向淡化,在此农业支持政策的指引下,我国农业的绿色发展水平偏低,但经过多年努力,我国农业的整体生产能力较强,这为我国推进增产导向的农业支持政策进行绿色生态转型提供了较大的改革空间。基于上述比较和发现,本文提出加大农业支持力度、优化农业支持结构、强化农业环境保护和鼓励涉农企业"走出去"等政策建议。     

Performance Implications of Incorporating Natural Environmental Issues into the Strategic Planning Process: An Empirical Assessment

This paper explores the ability of firms to integrate a critical strategic issue, the natural environment, into the strategic planning process within the natural resource-based perspective. Using survey data collected from a wide variety of firms and industries based in the United States, we empirically examined the antecedents and effects of integrating the natural environment into the formal planning process. These data were analysed using structural equation modelling with the LISREL technique. Overall, our data provided strong support for the hypothesized relationships. Specifically, we found that the level of integration of environmental management concerns in the strategic planning process was positively related to financial and environmental performance. Furthermore, we found that the greater the functional coverage and the more resources provided to environmental issues, the greater the integration of environmental issues in the planning process. These results suggest that concern for environmental issues may yield competitive advantages in the marketplace as the natural resource-based perspective suggests     

Managers' employment issues

The authors compare the employment issues in relation to managers in Britain and Australia, within a wider international context. Using the convergence/ divergence debates about the internationalization of management as a point of departure, the article analyses managers' education and development, employment trends, unemployment, recruitment and selection processes, human resource planning, job mobility, career success routes, pay and fringe benefits, and managerial unionization, which is more widespread in these countries than in the USA. The authors note both convergence and divergence between patterns of managerial employment in Britain and Australia compared with Japan, the USA and other countries, but draw attention to the need for more comparative research.     

Training and development deficiencies in ‘high skill’ sectors

Policy debates across advanced industrial economies are stressing the centrality of skills and training to compete in the new ‘knowledge economy’. In the UK increasing importance is being placed on improving workplace learning, yet policy has so far failed to confront the issue of employers' lack of investment in training and development. This article examines whether the high skill sectors that exist within the UK can provide a model of workplace learning for other such sectors to emulate. By using case study research from the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries, training and development practices are examined in relation to the requirements of the business and individual employees. The article will argue that the companies in question, despite their favourable product market position, remain constrained by the broader institutional environment.     

French Cultural Decentralization and International Expansion.Towards a Geometrically Variable Interculturalism?

For a long time French local and regional authorities were largely excluded from debates on cultural policy, and even more so from international cultural exchanges. Their intervention in this second area, in its most conventional forms to its contemporary networks, occupies a special place in the present issues. Being sustained by large increases in local and national budgets for culture, such an evolution necessarily raised certain strategic issues and debates, which are discussed in the paper. The international element of local cultural policies has only recently appeared as a potential area for local strategy development. It can be seen as the result of the cultural generation of the 1980s, from the point of view of actors in both the public and professional domain. This paper examines the three following aspects: the forms taken by cultural decentralization in its main stages, through the conferral of negotiated powers; the modifications in centre-periphery relations brought about by this decentralization; and the emergence of an international exchange dynamic as a result of these first two processes.     

INNOVATION POLICY: RATIONALES,LESSONS AND CHALLENGES

Innovation policy has emerged as a new field of economic policy during the last few decades. This paper explores the rationales for national innovation policies, as laid out in the existing literature on the subject, and considers what the lessons and challenges for theory and practice in this area are. Innovation policy attempts to influence innovation activity, often with the purpose of increasing economic growth. But it can also have more specific aims such as preventing unwarranted climate change, improving national health, and so on. The increasing attention given to innovation policy at the national level from the 1990s onwards went hand in hand with the development of a new, systemic understanding of innovation, which in a better way than before accounted for the ‘stylised facts’ of innovation activity as identified by empirical work. The system approach, as the paper shows, came to have a significant influence on the subsequent policy discourse. Drawing on recent advances in innovation-systems theory, a synthetic framework for the analysis of innovation policy is developed and used to highlight issues of particular relevance for the conduct of innovation policy and future scholarly work in this area.     

Organizational Learning: Debates Past, Present And Future

In this paper we attempt to map the development of organizational learning as a field of academic study by examining the rise and fall of specific debates. This does not pretend to be a comprehensive review of the field since there is now far too much material available to allow full coverage in any single publication. Rather, we have identified some of the key debates, and these have been organized along the simplistic time-line of past, present and future. Our purpose is two-fold: first, to note how the nature and language of the key ideas in organizational learning have changed over time; and second, to locate the papers in this Special Issue within the context of the developing field. It is perhaps no accident that we see most of the papers as closely associated with new, and emerging, issues, but we also find it interesting to note that many of these current or emergent issues actually have roots within some of the earlier debates.     

The characteristics and attributes of UK firms obtaining accreditation to ISO 14001

Environmental policy in the UK has tended to reflect orthodox textbook responses, focusing upon standard setting and taxation, both impacting upon the supply side of the economy. In addition, economic agents have the option of legal recourse to settle environmental disputes. Complementing this command and control framework is a growing tendency for firms to subscribe to additional voluntary environmental standards by, for example, registering with an appropriate agency, thereby signalling to others that they have adopted a particular scheme. This growing trend has far reaching consequences for future policy decisions and for financial and environmental performance of the firms. We aim here to identify the attributes of many firms which participate in ISO 14001. We use a probit model to determine, from a vector of firm and industry characteristics at one point in time, what factors influence the probability of firms registering with ISO 14001. We then utilize survival analysis to analyse how these characteristics impact upon the ‘hazard’ of accreditation over time. If significant differences exist between 14001 firms and others, important questions arise for academics and practitioners alike. Are certain types of firm hindered by their firm characteristics? Does the scheme favour larger firms over smaller firms, or high tech firms over low tech? Why do some industries have many accreditations whilst others have none? The analysis of such issues is not only an under‐developed area of academic debate, but also of direct relevance to practitioners within the field of environmental management and policy. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Strategic partnerships and relationship marketing in healthcare

Despite repeated government policies to introduce market-orientation and customer-focus into the UK National Health Service, there is still much anecdotal evidence of unsuccessful policy implementation. In this article we investigate the attitudes of healthcare managers to one recent policy initiative based on partnership working that is intended to provide integrated and customer-focused service to patients. While acknowledging the tensions and dilemmas inherent in private sector marketing concepts, we argue that relationship marketing has considerable potential in public healthcare contexts, based on its advocacy of building relationships between providers and customers and between providers and their suppliers. Using the framework of relationship marketing we identify healthcare managers' concerns about the motives, effects and benefits of implementing partnership arrangements in two regions of the NHS. Through a longitudinal research design our findings suggest that while respondents' attitudes to partnership working and customer focus had become more positive after two years of policy implementation, they remain centred on the service process rather than the customers it serves. We discuss what still needs to be done to transform public healthcare from what is still a predominantly supplier and product-driven service to one that is truly relationship orientated.     

The Red Queen and the environment: reconciling public regulation and business strategy

Until the late 1980s, environmental regulation in Denmark was often carried out in an intensely politicized and confrontational climate marked by strong tensions between authorities and polluting firms. In recent years, however, the general spirit of regulation seems to have improved significantly. During this same period, ‘generic’ measures such as general discharge limits have been supplemented with more specific demands, tailored for individual companies. The present paper presents a case study based on the environmental regulation of TripleNine, a West Jutland fishmeal factory. In response to major changes in its market and regulatory environment, the firm has revised its general strategy and taken a more pro‐active stance on environmental issues, pursuing a policy of active co‐operation with local environmental authorities. Informed by this and other case studies, a theoretical model is developed to account for the incorporation of ecological concerns into firms' general business strategy. Against the background of this model, the paper addresses the long‐term possibilities of reconciling business strategy and public regulation in the future. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.