Gentrification and Blight: Relationship to Involuntary Displacement

Because homelessness is visible in cities with high levels of gentrification, the media have linked the two phenomena. But the displacement taking place in most American cities is due more to blight than to gentrification. This article examines both sources of displacement and traces them to the same source: land speculation. In declining cities, land speculation causes parcels to be held vacant in prime locations, leading to disinvestment and an inadequate supply of affordable commercial and residential buildings. In cities with booming economies, land speculation leads to redevelopment of entire neighborhoods where land appreciates in value due to new commercial or residential demand. The solution to gentrification and blight as sources of displacement is to increase land value return and recycling to stabilize urban economies and avoid the boom-bust cycles that are so detrimental to cities.     

Non‐profit vulnerability: An exploratory study

This mixed‐method study explores the symptoms and potential causes of non‐profit vulnerability within the Australian context. Following two focus groups with CEOs and Chairs of non‐profit organizations, an online survey was developed, pilot tested and distributed to non‐profit CEOs. Our findings suggest three symptoms that might be particularly useful in identifying non‐profit vulnerability: a substantial increase in unit costs/delivery hours; a substantial increase in the proportion of administration to program expenses; and a reduced ability to pursue the organization's mission. The results also suggest various potential causes of non‐profit vulnerability; in particular, Board inadequacies; External environmental threats; Project management issues; and Funding constraints.     

Minimum‐data analysis of ecosystem service supply in semi‐subsistence agricultural systems

Antle and Valdivia (2006, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 50, 1–15) proposed a minimum‐data (MD) approach to simulate ecosystem service supply curves that can be implemented using readily available secondary data and validated the approach in a case study of soil carbon sequestration in a monoculture wheat system. However, many applications of the MD approach are in developing countries where semi‐subsistence systems with multiple production activities are being used and data availability is limited. This paper discusses how MD analysis can be applied to more complex production systems such as semi‐subsistence systems with multiple production activities and presents validation analysis for studies of soil carbon sequestration in semi‐subsistence farming systems in Kenya and Senegal. Results from these two studies confirm that ecosystem service supply curves based on the MD approach are close approximations to the curves derived from highly detailed data and models and are therefore sufficiently accurate and robust to be used to support policy decision making.     

Apology and Ambiguity: Adolf Berle on Corporate Power

A sociocognitive foundation for transformative agency requires much deeper exploration to adequately understand the causal origins of human interests, preferences, and choices as they shape both the emergence of institutions and the process of institutional change. In the collegial spirit of rapprochement, reminiscent of earlier efforts at “bridge-building,” our central contention is that the new institutional economics of “late” Douglass C. North (2005) North, Douglass C. Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] provides such a sociocognitive approach, as well as an important ontological frame for dealing with embedded agency. This agency may afford original institutional economics a complementary meta-theoretical account of how institutions are formed and changed over time.     

Innovation,embeddedness and policy: evidence from life sciences in three UK regions

This paper draws upon a survey of the life science and biotechnology regions of Oxford, Central Scotland and South West England to examine the innovation and embeddedness traits of the regions. The insights into the compositional weaknesses and strengths of the regions suggest opportunities and threats for the future development of the UK's life sciences and biotechnology. The discussion moves forward debates on biotechnology, regional innovation, regional economic development and policy by posing research questions relating to the gap of knowledge of two under-researched regions, the need for a differentiated view of regions and a public policy approach tailored towards them, as well as the prospects of ‘engineering’ high-tech regions. Some of the highlighted policy challenges are common to the three regions, while others are region-specific and reflect the variations of regional make-up and stage of development.     

Institutional Realities and Constraints on Change: The Case of SME in Russia

This article presents the results of exploratory field research investigating the impact of the enabling institutional environment and internal firm capabilities in the information technology sector in St. Petersburg, Russia. Through a series of semi-structured interviews and confirmatory research through the UNDP and UNIDO, the study finds the emerging institutional environment remains weak, unpredictable and unstable, creating challenges for SMEs to contribute to the growth and development of the Russian economy.     

Public Leadership: A review of the literature and framework for future research

Abstract

This study analyses and reviews the literature on public leadership with a novel combination of bibliometric methods. We detect four generic approaches to public leadership (i.e. a functionalist, a behavioural, a biographical and a reformist approach) which differ with regard to their philosophy of science (i.e. objective vs subjective) and level of analysis (i.e. micro-level vs multi-level). From our findings, we derive four directions for future research which involve shifting the focus from the aspect of ‘leadership’ to the element of ‘public’, from simplicity to complexity, from universalism to cultural relativism and from public leadership to public followership.     

Satisfied with red tape? Leadership,civic duty,and career intention in the military

We examine how the coerciveness of HR procedures and leadership behaviours affect job satisfaction (JS) and career intention (CI), and how civic duty (CD) mediates these relationships. Within the framework of the human resource management performance chain, we draw on leadership and motivational theories and test the proposed relations in a structural equation model with data from a survey of the Federal Armed Forces Germany (n = 1,331). The findings show that the behaviour of supervisors, rather than red tape, influences JS and CI. The results extend our understanding of the interplay between leadership behaviours and followership attitudes under high degrees of organizational coercion.     

什么阻滞了中国的国富？——新科诺奖得主普雷斯科特专访

倘若生活在200年前的中国，你的生活水平与欧洲人无异，而当时的美国仅仅是一片蛮荒之地。然而，伴随着现代经济的发展，20世纪的世界经济格局发生了巨大变化，美国和日本先后超越英国，上演了经济高速发展的奇迹。那么，到底是什么原因阻碍了中国汇入现代经济发展的洪流？在2004年诺贝尔经济学奖得主——爱德华·普雷斯科特(Edward Christian Prescott)看来，闭关锁国是导致中国经济停滞不前的根源，”宋朝时候的中国很富裕，