Enriching Intergenerational Decision-Making with Guided Visualization Exercises

Seriously engaging with the needs, hardships, and aspirations of future generations is an emotional experience as much as an intellectual endeavor. In this essay we describe a guided visualization exercise used to overcome the emotional barriers that often prevent us from dealing effectively with intergenerational decisions. The meditation and dreaming technique was applied to a diverse group of researchers who engaged in a visualized encounter with future generations. Following the exercise, we concluded that a serious analysis of intergenerational conflict requires us to confront our own mortality. Also, somewhat surprisingly to workshop participants, our desire to become stewards of the planet was driven by our fear of death as well as our egoist yearning for immortality. We posit that imagining the unknown with visioning practices might increase our emotional resilience, and hence improve our ability to confront the burdens of intergenerational responsibility.     

One Kind of Freedom: Poverty Dynamics in Post-apartheid South Africa

A 1993 South African living standards survey documented the legacy of apartheid in the form high levels of inequality and human insecurity. Drawing on a 1998 re-survey of households in the 1993 study, this paper explores whether this legacy has been superseded, or whether apartheid's end has been only one kind of freedom that has left households in a poverty trap from which they cannot escape. After proposing a theoretically grounded dynamic poverty typology that distinguishes stochastic from structural poverty transitions, the paper goes on to estimate that significant numbers of the South African poor are potentially trapped in a structural poverty trap and lack the means to escape poverty over time.     

Ownership and trust

In unique research, Julian Franks looked at over 100 years of data on corporate ownership and found that relationships of trust have been a crucial historical ingredient in the ownership of firms. He argues that relationships of trust are as important now as ever.     

Why is Knowledge Management So Difficult?

Knowledge management promises much, but often delivers very little. There are no simple solutions to this challenge. This article starts by trying to define what knowledge management is. It then identifies where the problems lie and suggests five steps to resolve those problems. The article is based on research in a dozen leading companies, including HP, Ericsson, ABB, Skandia and Xerox.     

Trade Union Responses to Outsourcing in a Neo-Liberal Environment: A Case Study Analysis of the Australian Public Sector

Australia has witnessed a rapid growth in outsourcing over the past decade with the public sector being the clear leader in these initiatives. Explanations of the rise of outsourcing tend to emphasize economic and human resources management factors and neglect the political dimension. In particular, unions and collective labour relations have been a target of a neo-liberal reform agenda pursued by both Labour and conservative governments, which has included outsourcing as a means of individualizing the employment relationship and reducing union influence. This can be seen clearly from the experience of the state of Victoria both in its reform of local government and its electricity generation industry where a carefully implemented programme of downsizing and outsourcing played upon existing divisions in the workforce. In both cases a pragmatic, survival oriented response from the major unions was elicited.     

Estimating time-varying variances and covariances via nearest neighbour multivariate predictions: applications to the NYSE and the Madrid Stock Exchange Index

In this article, we present a technique to obtain the time-varying covariance matrix for several time series for nearest neighbour predictors. To illustrate the use of this technique, we analyse the time-varying variances and correlations between the daily returns on two equity stock market indexes, the New York Stock Exchange and the Madrid Stock Exchange Index.