The price of the poor's words: social relations and the economics of deposing for one's ‘betters’ in early modern England

Historians of early modern England are aware that the legal testimony of poor, dependent, and subordinated individuals was regarded with suspicion. Contemporaries believed that labouring people would provide false evidence in return for ‘gifts’ or ‘rewards’. To what extent did such assumptions accurately reflect the processes whereby such witnesses came to depose for their ‘betters’? This article uses sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century perjury and subornation suits from the court of Star Chamber to reconstruct labouring people's experiences and understandings of the politics of testimony. In explicating the structural and material factors that could militate against their deposing, override their reservations about doing so, and colour the contents of the depositions they gave, it makes two broader contributions to our understanding of the period. On the one hand, it presents a markedly more pessimistic account of the social relations involved in the increase in litigation. On the other, it reappraises a category of source—depositions—that historians have long regarded as providing singularly privileged access to the expressions of social groups that left little trace in the historical record.     

A tail of two personalities: How canine companions shape relationships and well-being

More people own pets than ever before. Further, people spend more money on pets than they ever have. The increase in pet ownership and spending on pets provides evidence of the importance humans place on the pets in their lives. This study explores the relationships between humans and their animal companions, specifically canine companions. Drawing on decades of research on personality, relationships, and well-being, the current research takes a cross-species approach to examine the influence of pet personalities on human outcomes. Using personality assessments for human and dog, the article examines how both personalities impact relationship satisfaction. The article also examines how human-dog closeness impacts owner well-being. Some findings corroborate results found in the human personality and relationship literature, but others point to some unique aspects of the human-dog bond. These results not only shed light on the human-dog relationship but also suggest some departures from the human relationship literature that could be explored in future research.     

Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism

Urban political ecology (UPE), an offshoot of political ecology that emerged in the late 1990s, has had two major impacts on critical urban studies: it has introduced critical political ecology to urban settings, and it has provided a framework for retheorizing the city as a product of metabolic processes of socionatural transformation. However, there was another goal in early UPE programmatic statements that has largely fallen by the wayside: to mobilize a Lefebvrian theoretical framework to trouble traditional distinctions between urban/rural and society/nature by exploring urbanization as a global process. Instead of following this potentially fruitful path, UPE has become bogged down in ‘methodological cityism’––an overwhelming analytical and empirical focus on the traditional city to the exclusion of other aspects of contemporary urbanization processes. Thus UPE's Lefebvrian promise, of a research program that could work across traditional disciplinary divisions and provide insights into a new era of planetary urbanization, has remained unfulfilled. In this article we trace UPE's history to show how it arrived at its present predicament, and offer some thoughts on a research agenda for a political ecology not of the city but of urbanization.     

加州伯克利分校哈斯商学院 社会责任能够提升公司业绩吗？

当前,公司若能把盈利和社会责任联系在一起,是一件有吸引力并且很时髦的事。如果你能创造出一种具有积极社会效益的商业模式,那就会形成一种多赢的局面,你的股东、雇员还有广大公众都能够受益。     

Drivers of sustainable intensification in Kenyan rural and peri-urban vegetable production

Sustainable intensification promotes environmentally sound and productive agriculture. However, use of sustainable intensification practices (SIPs) is low in many sub-Sharan African countries. This study examined the adoption of SIPs in Kenyan rural and peri-urban vegetable production to understand the scale of and underlying factors in the use of SIPs. A multistage sampling technique was employed to randomly select 685 rural and peri-urban vegetable farm households. Household data was then collected and anaylsed for four practices namely improved irrigation, integrated soil fertility, organic manure and crop diversification using a pre-tested structured questionnaire. A multivariate probit model was run to model simultaneous interdependent adoption decisions. Adoption of organic manure and African indigenous vegetables (AIV) diversification was high in both rural and peri-urban areas. However, adoption of improved irrigation systems and integrated soil fertility management was low, and even significantly lower in rural areas than in peri-urban areas (p?相似文献   

Effect of bilateral and multilateral concessional debts on public investment in Africa: A contingency analysis

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relative influence of bilateral and multilateral concessional debts on public investment in 32 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1985–2020. Dynamic panel autoregressive distributed lag models comprising the mean group, pooled mean group and dynamic fixed effect estimators were employed in our model estimations. The results revealed that bilateral and multilateral concessional debts had a long-run positive and significant effect on public investment. The findings indicated that a 1% change in bilateral and multilateral concessional debt was associated with 8.6 and 11.3% increases in public investment, respectively. While the short-run influence of bilateral concessional debts was significantly positive, multilateral concessional debts had a short-run positive but insignificant effect on public investment. It is discovered that institutional quality is associated with declines in public investment. The contingency analysis shows that institutional quality explains a lot about how well bilateral and multilateral concessional debts drive public investment. The evidence suggests that poor institutional quality is more likely to undermine the effectiveness of bilateral concessional debts on productive investment than multilateral concessional debts.