基于乡镇企业战略体制变革的企业文化变革

本文阐述了新时期的我国乡镇企业所面临的竞争局势、产业结构调整问题,乡镇企业急待需要进行战略体制变革;探讨了企业体制变革的维度之一——企业文化变革对于这种企业战略体制变革的功效。具体地描述企业文化变革与战略体制变革的路径选择的优化问题,便于企业操作或实施。     

Give peas a chance: Transformations in food consumption and production systems

Food production chains can be organised in a variety of ways. Conventional ‘industrial’ agricultural practices are based on advanced breeding techniques and major inputs of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Food produced in this way is transport-intensive, requires high-energy processing, relies on modern retailing systems and demands high-tech kitchens. Many argue that the industrialised systems should be dismantled and replaced with alternative methods of agriculture, food processing and distribution that emphasise social and environmental sustainability. This paper looks at the environmental and social sustainability of different strategies for food systems by analysing the whole chain of production, processing, distribution and consumption activities of the production of frozen peas, a vegetable that is ‘symbolic’ of modern food systems and the UK diet.     

Rural Adaptation in Russia: Who Responds and How Do We Measure It?

Utilizing survey data from 800 households in five regions of Russia, this article attempts to measure adaptation to reform stimuli according to socio-economic strata. While the orthodox literature has emphasized rural resistance to reform, in fact one of the main analytical obstacles is differentiating between adaptive and survival strategies. Time horizon is used as the primary criterion to distinguish between adaptive and survival behaviour. The article analyses adaptive responses by examining the use of rural credit, the operation of a household business, the enlargement of household land plots and a set of attitudes that taken together comprise an 'entrepreneurial spirit'.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Ian Phimister, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the 'Dark Forests' of Matabeleland
Dagfinn Gatu, Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China: The Taihang Base Area in the War of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945
Marc Blecher, Sources of Chinese Economic Growth 1978–1996
Louise Fortmann, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India
Frank Dikötter, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968
Ben Fine, The World Bank: Structure and Policies
Jonathan Pincus, Economic Transition in Vietnam: Trade and Aid in the Demise of Centrally Planned Economy
Vivek Chibber, An Agrarian History of South Asia, The New Cambridge History of India, IV, 4     

Variance stabilizing and normalizing transformations for the compound poisson process

Summary Two parametric sets of normalizing transformations for the compound Poisson process are considered. The transformations in the first set are also variance stabilizing, and the optimum variance stabilizing transformation and an optimum normalizing transformation in this set are determined. The second set consists of power transformations, and an optimum normalizing transformation is obtained. Some comparisons with respect to normalization are made between these optimum transformations. The work of this author was performed while he was a visitor at the Department of Statistics, State University of New York at Buffalo.     

传统儒商文化与现代商人理想人格的型塑

传统儒商文化与现代社会的重要结合点之一,即是从传统商业文化的现代转型出发,将儒商文化作为现代商人理想人格型塑的必要思想资源,从商人精神的觉醒与儒商身份意识的自觉,以地方商帮为依托进行商业文化生态的现代性重建。     

Class formation and commodity chains in the making of regional monocultures: Agrarian reform from above and below in Mexico's henequen and cotton zones

This paper analyses the rise and fall of two regional monocultures in Mexico: the henequen zone in the southern state of Yucatán and the cotton‐growing area of La Laguna. Both regions experienced a dramatic expansion of commodity production between 1870 and 1910, but their key crops came to be cultivated under different labour regimes: debt peonage in the case of henequen and wage labour in the case of cotton. The process of class formation that unfolded in each region culminated in the 1930s in different kinds of crises. In Yucatán, a political struggle between hacienda owners and the federal government resulted in an agrarian reform “from above.” In La Laguna, class conflict between rural wageworkers and the landed bourgeoisie forced an agrarian reform “from below.” These previously distinct labour regimes converged in subsequent decades, however, as rural producers became de facto wageworkers on state‐organized and state‐administered production units known as collective ejidos. Ultimately, changes in the global markets for cotton and henequen, combined with the inability of the Mexican state to reconcile the political logic of agrarian clientelism with shifting commodity chain dynamics, resulted in the collapse of these regional monocultures in the late 20th century.     

Shifting frontier dynamics in Latin America

The concepts of resource frontier and commodity frontier are often treated interchangeably. This article suggests the benefits of clarifying these concepts because frontiers remain important analytics for understanding drastic land‐use changes and other socio‐environmental transformations. Based on long‐term field research in different parts of South and Central America, we use frontier concepts as heuristic devices to analyze heterogeneous frontier situations and make broader generalizations. Our synchronic and diachronic analyses of frontier dynamics elucidate different frontier modalities and shifting frontier expansions. The concept of commoditizing resource frontier is introduced to explain recent frontier‐makings in Brazilian Amazonia and Cerrado and in the Nicaraguan Río San Juan. Although earlier frontier research took a short‐term time perspective and created conceptualizations based on a single modality of a particular period, our longitudinal analysis shows that drastic changes and complex overlappings are the hallmarks of frontier dynamics.     

Estimating structural equation models with non-normal variables by using transformations

We discuss structural equation models for non-normal variables. In this situation the maximum likelihood and the generalized least-squares estimates of the model parameters can give incorrect estimates of the standard errors and the associated goodness-of-fit chi-squared statistics. If the sample size is not large, for instance smaller than about 1000, asymptotic distribution-free estimation methods are also not applicable. This paper assumes that the observed variables are transformed to normally distributed variables. The non-normally distributed variables are transformed with a Box–Cox function. Estimation of the model parameters and the transformation parameters is done by the maximum likelihood method. Furthermore, the test statistics (i.e. standard deviations) of these parameters are derived. This makes it possible to show the importance of the transformations. Finally, an empirical example is presented.     

Post-Earthquake Land Appropriations and the Dispossession of Rural Women in Haiti

ABSTRACT

This study examines the trajectory of rural women’s labor in the wake of post-earthquake land appropriations in Haiti. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted between 2010 and 2013, it explores gendered access to land in Haiti in both historical and contemporary contexts, paying attention to the nature of rural gender relations and how they influence women’s access to land and their roles in petty commerce. The study describes the stratification of rural market women, their lived experience, and how losing land access will affect their traditional roles as market women. Ultimately it argues that without access to land, and a paucity of available wage work, recent dispossession will intensify existing vulnerabilities for rural women and narrow their means of household production by forcing them to depend on informal market activity in their roles as machann (market women).