Bodies of Knowledge in Reproduction: Epistemic Boundaries in the Political Economy of Fertility

Professionals compete and cooperate over how states should govern their population. Declining fertility rates in advanced economies have led to debates about how to enable those of reproductive age to have more children and to have them earlier. This springs from political and socio-economic concerns about fulfilling desired fertility rates, maintaining high levels of human capital, and supporting fiscal and pension systems. This article investigates professionals addressing declining fertility through assisted reproductive technologies (ART), including doctors, demographers and economists. These professional groups have their own bodies of knowledge on how they view fertility, fecundity and the role of women in social reproduction. They can also cooperate to create ‘issue linkages’ on ART across their professional ecologies. The article discusses how professionals apply their bodies of knowledge to the political economy of fertility. Professional bodies of knowledge directly inform how women and men are treated on fertility issues and the policy options available.     

Climate,carbon, civil war and flexible boundaries: Sudan's contested landscape

The confluence of climate change, oil development, farmer–nomad interaction, and civil war has given rise to serious contestation over land and water resources in the heart of Sudan. Here we report on direct involvement in the very difficult and protracted efforts to resolve these land-use conflicts. Repeated efforts to define and implement “hard demarcation” of boundaries in agroecological regions characterized by great temporal variability across space have been unsuccessful for many reasons. In semi-arid and savanna environments, where nomads share the use of land with sedentary communities, boundary disputes are minimized by the existence of flexible demarcations. Flexible boundaries are identifiable but subject to change in response to negotiation and agreement among resource users. It seems that the struggle is always over “rights” to particular areas of land. But it is necessary to understand the distinction between interests and rights. Each individual – and each group – has interests that they will seek to protect and, very often, enhance. But the conversion of interests into rights is a more difficult matter. As long as the need to deal with risk and uncertainty dominate livelihood strategies, flexible adaptation rather than rigid boundaries remains the optimal strategy in agro-pastoral economies.     

Management across boundaries: A municipal dilemma

Public sector mergers have the potential of being viable alternative to other public sector reforms in the striving toward making public service provision more equipped to confront some of the challenges faced today. Mergers however often fail to deliver promised results. Previous research point to the importance of post‐merger integrating processes for realizing the synergies expected from mergers. However, so far these studies have focused on what occurs inside organizations and less on the interplay between different levels. By adopting a governance and top management perspective, this study increases our understanding of the importance of political decisions on the outcome of a merger in the public sector context. Further, this study increases our understanding of how organizational boundaries on different levels of merging organizations influence post‐merger integrating processes and the role of different actors as boundary spanners. The results of this study are based on five case studies of public sector mergers at the local level in Sweden.     

Building from below: subsidiary management moderation of employment practices in MNCs in China

The international human resource management literature has a long tradition of examining the impact of institutional differences on the employment practices adopted by multinational corporations (MNCs). The question of how actors make sense of institutional differences, however, has received less research attention. This study examines the enactment of employment practices as institutional differences are translated, contextualized and deployed by managers at subsidiaries of MNCs. Based on intensive case studies at two Japanese–Chinese joint-venture manufacturing plants, the study first shows that distinctive employment practices were adopted to manage the boundaries between employee groups. These distinctions are then explained by the institutional difference between the home country (Japan) and the host country (China) as well as the way that institutional differences were represented by the managers in the process of designing, developing and executing employment practices. The study therefore argues that country differences are not only assumed spaces, but are also a reservoir of management resources that are moderated, in the case of employment practices, by actors’ strategic choices and political actions before they are enacted in the subsidiary.     

O．E．威廉姆森学术思想发展的三个阶段

2009年诺贝尔经济学奖获得者O．E．威廉姆森的学术思想经历了三个发展阶段：早期侧重于企业行为与市场管制；巅峰时期研究交易成本和企业边界；晚年集中于公司治理和管理。威廉姆森的研究深受赫伯特．西蒙的影响，将经济学、管理学、法学、心理学、政治学等结合起来，从跨学科的视角研究真实世界里的企业，对经济发展和社会科学研究产生了广泛而深远的影响。     

Canonical interpretation of propositions as events

This paper establishes conditions under which Savage's (1954) informal interpretation of subjective probabilities as measures of confidence in the truth of propositions can be formally justified. For this purpose we construct, for any given propositional language, a canonical state space such that each proposition a of the language is associated with a unique event A defined on this state space. As our main result we establish a one–one onto correspondence between the canonical state space and the set of all truth conditions for the propositional logic such that proposition a is exactly true at every truth condition that corresponds to some state in A. According to our approach, an agent's degree of confidence in the truth of a proposition can, therefore, be interpreted as his or her subjective probability that some truth condition holds at which the proposition is true. Such an interpretation, however, is only valid for agents with unlimited powers of logical reasoning.     

新自由主义与国家空间:反思与启示

2008年以来的全球金融危机将世界政治经济环境推向所谓的后新自由主义时代。文章首先回顾新自由主义的起源,以及不同政治地理背景下的新自由主义在发展与演变过程中的异同。其后,文章介绍学术界对新自由主义思潮获致的三点共识:其一,民族国家的意义并没有因为新自由主义而消亡;其二,理解政府在经济发展中的角色对于理解新自由主义至关重要;其三,新自由主义的发展因地而异。新自由主义思潮在全球扩散的同时塑造新的国家空间。新国家空间有三个特点:尺度重组、柔性边界与扁平化。研究指出,不论新自由主义是否终结,其局限性已经凸显,因此有必要跳出新自由主义的思维模式,思考如何在新自由主义创造的所谓新国家空间中,重塑政府监管,思考各国发展经济的全球责任,并思考创造社会空间再分配模式的可持续性等问题。     

How has Oregon's land use planning system affected property values?

Oregon's landmark land use planning system has been criticized for imposing large negative effects on landowners’ property values, although evidence to support these claims has been lacking. This paper examines longitudinal data for undeveloped parcels since before adoption of the planning system. The sample includes parcels under different land use regulations, and it compares Oregon to Washington. The results indicate generally that property values have increased at similar rates both inside and outside urban growth boundaries, and across parcels zoned for different uses and across state lines. The results are consistent both with theory and with other studies indicating land use regulations can have positive, neutral or negative effects.     

The emergence of career boundaries in unbounded industries: career odysseys in the Italian New Economy

The main objective of this research1 was to study boundaries to the ‘boundaryless career’ in a novel context. Our empirical study focused on career paths leading top managers to enter emergent firms. We collected data on professional histories of a sample of top managers who operated in firms listed at the ‘Nuovo Mercato’ (New Market), the Italian equivalent of the NASDAQ. We demonstrate the existence of two major kinds of boundaries: competence-based (in the form of industry boundaries) and relation-based (in the form of professional network boundaries). A second objective of our research was to identify dominant individual career logics and to connect different career logics to the boundaryless career concept. Our data reveal the dominance of the evolutionary career logic.     

Contracting Boundaries as Institutional Infrastructure: Efficacy, Adaptation, and Obsolescence: Commentary on La Croix and Ghiselin's Comments

The New Institutional Economics (NIE) emphasizes that different governance structures generate a rich variety of observed institutional arrangements. In Yarbrough & Yarbrough (1999), we extended this reasoning to argue that different governance structures also carry implications for the sets of acceptable contracting partners or ‘insiders’. Here we discuss various contracting groups as institutional infrastructures and evaluate their efficiency, ability to adapt, and longevity or possible obsolescence in the face of changes in the nature of transactions or of the transactional environment. The fact that, despite their many shortcomings, private institutional infrastructures continue to be built, to adapt, and to function, even in modern societies with well-developed state-based legal systems, provides a measure of the centrality and complexity of the task of assuring contractual integrity. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.