CORPORATE IDEOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF ENTREPRENEURISM IN NEW ORLEANS

In this article, Louis F. Miron presents a case study of the effects of local ideology and culture on corporate-lead progrowth movements in New Orleans. Miron borrows from critical theory to illustrate how "hegemonic" ideologies such as economic growth may be resisted in local settings. The findings suggest that economic structural relations do not predetermine the course of human agency, and that the success of progrowth movements is contingent upon local cultural conditions and ethos. Through a document analysis of "fiscal reform," a pro-growth ideology advanced by corporate and political elites in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana, the author probes the connections among material conditions, ideology, and the politics of entrepreneurism.     

PERCEPTIONS OF ENERGY PROBLEMS AND THE ADOPTION OF CONSERVATION PRACTICES IN EDMONTON AND CALGARY

The success of government efforts to stimulate energy conservation among the public ultimately depends on understanding patterns of energy consumption, perceptions of energy resources, and the adoption of conservation practices. These issues were addressed in a survey of residents of Edmonton and Calgary. Most respondents dismissed the seriousness of energy problems at the provincial level, although energy scarcity at the national and global scales was widely recognized. Conservation behaviour was characterized by a narrow range of adjustments perceived and adopted, attributable largely to patterns of resource perception and socio-economic factors.
La réussite des efforts gouvernementaux pour stimuler les conservations d'energie dépend, en dernière analyse, d' une compréhension des schémas de la consommation énergétique, desperceptions des resourcesénergétiques, et del'adoption d' habitudesconservatrices. On a interrogé les habitants d' Edmonton et de Calgary ace sujet. La plupart des réponses ignorent la gravité des problèmes d'énergie au niveau provincial, quoiqu'elles admettent la précarité des ressources énergétiques à l' échelle nationale et mondiale. L' attitude conservatrice se distingue plus particulikrèment à partir d' ajustements limités reliés géneralement aux schémas de perceptions énergétiques et aux facteurs socio-économiques.     

BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS AND CONGRESS' ROLE IN WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT

In 1975 Congress required that budgetary requests for selected defense programs be accompanied by a statement assessing their arms control effects. Implementation of this requirement has fallen far short of unqualified success, and several proposals for remedying its failures are now being discussed. If remedies are based on incomplete or faulty diagnoses of the requirement's failures, however, they could exacerbate its dysfunctional aspects. This article suggests that the requirement has been unsuccessful because of an inadequate appreciation both of the political dynamics of the bureaucratic process involved and of the objective problems of these arms control issues. The analysis presented here concentrates on the former and suggests that further legislative modifications to the requirement are unlikely to be fruitful.     

OVER TIME: TIME AND POLITICS IN THE USSR

In areas in which 46 million Soviet citizens live, official statutory time is not observed. Most of these areas lie in the western part of the third Soviet time zone and date from 1930-31 when the Soviet Union adopted Daylight Saving Time on a year round basis. When an additional Summer Time was announced in 1980 (beginning in 1981 from April 1 to October 1), putting the clock two hours ahead of standard time for the summer, it was also announced that local deviations from statutory time would be terminated. In 1982, however, continued local deviations were noted, and some, in fact, permitted by the state. The explanation offered is that citizens and local readers in these areas wish to be on the same time as Moscow.     

简述在中国发现的拜占庭帝国金币及其仿制品

迄今为止在中国境内已经出土发现了36枚拜占庭帝国金币及其仿制品,这36枚所发现的拜占庭金币及其仿制品都是通过当时的丝绸之路流入,它们是当时东西方商品相互交易流通的必然产物,且根据它们的铸     

PROBLEMS IN POLICY ANALYSIS AND URBAN GOVERNMENT

Malcolm C. Getz, The Economics of the Urban Fire Department
Robert K. Yin, Changing Urban Bureaucracies
Pietro S. Nivola, The Urban Service Problem     

"酷儿"视角下的城市性和空间政治

围绕城市与同性恋的主题,本文从现代性的视角回顾了同性恋作为一个"社会群体"在城市中的出现和发展,强调了同性恋身份认同本质上的城市属性.文章揭示了同性恋研究在城市研究中的独特地位,并主要探讨了组织和控制城市空间与同性恋欲望和权利表达之间的张力,尤其关注同性恋现象在不同社会语境下"公共空间"的建构.文章以2009年中国大陆主要城市中"同志"社群引发媒体关注的事件为例,展现了这个群体争取公共空间,改变城市社会景观的努力.文章认为当代中国同性恋社群不断提升的社会可见度和日益扩展的公共空间,反映了中国城市和社会发生的积极变化.     

HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.