Tattoo: marketplace icon

ABSTRACT

The tattoo may be considered iconic in terms of its ability to reflect and contribute to consumer culture. It encapsulates contemporary tensions between the paradigm of plasticity that has engulfed the body and skin and a disavowal of that paradigm by marking the body in a permanent fashion. Tattoos also manage to articulate discourses of deviance and the mainstream, difference and sameness. Further, the “invariant processual contour” of tattoo remains the same across cultures and histories while also managing to evidence differences in emphasis. Similarly, the functions of tattoo in terms of decoration, ritual, identification, and protection continue to trace the boundaries of their possibilities. Ultimately, in a culture that values individuality, these coordinates of tattoo offer a clear opportunity to (re)story the self in infinitely customizable ways.     

A New Paradigm in Guiding: The Madrich as a Role Model

The “role model” guides encountered in the counselors of Israel Experience youth study tours, contrast traditional concepts of pathfinder and mentor. This model type is proposed as more appropriate for tours providing informal education and quest for identity. Not drawing authority from official recognition but from a personal guide–tourist relationship, madrichs rated characteristics essential to guides leading these trips. A multi-dimensional analysis uncovered the structure of these characteristics to create a structure of an “excellent” Israel Experience madrich. This structural analysis confirms an earlier typology and helps to uncover another kind of approach towards youth guiding.     

Spillovers from foreign direct investment: Within or between industries?

This paper contributes an estimation framework to measure both technological and linkage externalities from foreign direct investment (FDI). Empirical research dealt mainly with intra-industry spillovers from FDI with restrictive treatment of inter-industry effects until recently. However, as optimal organization of the multinational corporation (MNC) involves minimization of profit losses due to leakage of technical information to competitors, host-country firms within the MNC's sector experience limited productivity gains ensuing FDI. Host-country producers in other sectors may benefit. For example, MNCs transfer knowledge to local downstream clients, or outsource to local upstream suppliers. Hence, FDI substitutes within-sector domestic investment but complements it across sectors. The net impact on aggregate capital formation by host-country producers hinges on the interaction between linkages and spillovers. Estimations based on the Colombian Manufacturing Census yield the sectoral pattern of FDI spillovers displaying knowledge propagation between but not within industries. The findings reveal outsourcing relationships of MNCs with local upstream suppliers as the channel of diffusion.     

Equalization and the Decentralization of Revenue–Raising in a Federation

We study federal economies in which regional governments have responsibility for delivering public services and redistributive objectives apply. The implications of these for the assignment of revenue–raising instruments and fiscal transfers, both vertical and horizontal, are considered. Models of heterogeneous regions of varying degrees of complexity and generality are constructed. For each case, we determine what fiscal instruments must be given to the regions and what intergovernmental transfers must be made in order that the social optimum is achieved. With heterogenous households and regions, the social optimum can be decentralized by making regions responsible for redistribution and implementing equalization transfers that depend on the number of households of each type.     

Surplus or Deficit – Who Cares? Cross-subsidy in Colleges of Higher Education

The traditional ethos of higher education encourages the provision of a broad range of academic subjects aimed at producing overall benefits to society and the economy, rather than focusing on the provision of subjects that can achieve financial viability. Under such an ethos the existence of cross-subsidy goes largely unquestioned. However, pressures on higher education funding, combined with an increasing emphasis on accountability, performance measurement and value for money mean that attitudes to cross-subsidy may be changing. This study, which concentrates on one specific sector of higher education, i.e. colleges of higher education, consists of a pilot study at one institution and a sector-wide survey and examines the extent to which the cross-subsidy of academic departments is tolerated by senior managers. Although a number of reasons for tolerating cross-subsidy were supported by the respondents, an analysis of the results reveal much lower levels of support from the finance directors of colleges of higher education than from other senior managers.     

An Overview of the Evolution of Agricultural Cooperatives in Québec

Two agricultural cooperatives dominate in Québec, Coopérative fédérée and Agropur, with sales of 2.4 billion and 1.9 billion, respectively. Although they share similar traits, their evolution over the years has resulted in different business models. In turn, their business models have important implications in terms of their relationship with farmers' union, their sensitivity to policy changes and their approach to capital access problems. Nevertheless, the outlook for agricultural cooperatives in Quebec appears to be good, given the support that the Québec government intends to give them in appreciation of their stability and capability to promote regional development.     

THE THEORY OF PUBLIC ENTERPRISE RECONSIDERED

A comparison of the essential characteristics of public and private enterprise against the background of agency theory shows that archetypal public enterprise is not an enterprise in the generally accepted legal and economic senses of that expression. If it is to be efficient, therefore, archetypal public enterprise must not be left dependent upon governance and monitoring systems appropriate to private enterprise but must, by means of an intimate and cooperative (and not an ‘arm's length') relationship between the principal (government) and the agent (management), be provided with precisely defined and quantified objectives that lead to an agreed measure of overall performance. The essay's conclusions are important because, inter alia, they shift the efficiency debate from property to governance.