The Evolution of Biotechnology in Three Continents: Schumpeterian or Penrosian?

This Editorial introduces the Special Issue on ‘Biotechnology Clusters and Beyond’. Drawing on the interventions of five commissioned articles from Canada, Germany, Israel, the UK and the US it suggests that biotechnology clusters are interesting and important intellectually and for policy deliberation. They pose questions about basic cluster theory because localized networks, though intense, may not be as extensive as global ones in firm practices, especially as these evolve over time. Moreover, innovation is more deeply embedded in the publicly funded science base than for ‘Porterian’ clusters. Regarding innovation, biotechnology is also less obviously Schumpeterian, there being little market-driven ‘creative destruction’, and is arguably, with its strong emphasis on both large- and small-firm ‘capabilities’—Penrosian—an emphasis in clustering research and applications that warrants further investigation. Finally, at the specific technology-exploitation phase, market interactions assert themselves over milieu characteristics because scientists know the value of their discoveries and there is accordingly high appropriability associated with such knowledge capabilities.     

The changing abundance of backed artefacts in south-eastern Australia: a response to Holocene climate change?

The timing of the introduction, proliferation and decline of backed artefacts in Australia has been much debated. In south-eastern Australia, after initially appearing at least 8500 years ago, backed artefacts greatly increased in number between 4000 and 3500 years ago to the extent that they are found in numerous sites and are recorded in large numbers in individual sites from that time. From about 1500 years ago they declined markedly in number and had seemingly disappeared by the time of British colonization. Models explaining their proliferation advance the proposition that increased backed artefact production was triggered by heightened foraging risk and/or social re-organisation brought about by a change in climate to a regime which was cooler and drier than any other time during the Holocene combined with intensified ENSO climatic conditions. Our study develops this hypothesis by inferring the use of backed artefacts at Mussel Shelter in the Sydney Basin through an integrated use-wear and residue analysis. These inferences provide new insights into the nature of the evolutionary changes in tool production and use in response to the period of altered climatic conditions.     

The construction of gender-sensitive peacebuilding in Australia: ‘Advance Australia Fair’

Australia was the first United Nations member state to commit to the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund when it was established in 2006, and it has made annual contributions since then. Australia has also made significant contributions towards enhancing gender equality in peace and security governance, most recently during its 2013–14 term of office on the United Nations Security Council, recognising that gender matters in and to all aspects of peacebuilding activity. This article offers a discourse-theoretical policy analysis of a range of Australian Agency for International Development guidelines and strategies addressing gender and peacebuilding issues, and reads these against the international framework to explore the discursive construction of gender-sensitive peacebuilding in Australia. The authors argue that the representations of peacebuilding in the documents they analyse shape how Australia engages in peacebuilding-related activities and inform how Australia is positioned internationally as a peacebuilding actor.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.     

Australia: a continuing genocide?

Debates about genocide in Australia have for the most part focussed on past frontier killings and child removal practices. This article, however, focuses on contemporary culturally destructive policies, and the colonial structures that produce them, through the analytical lens of the concept of genocide. The article begins with a discussion of the meaning of cultural genocide, locating the idea firmly in Lemkin's work before moving on to engage with the debates around Lemkin's distinction between genocide and cultural 'diffusion.' In contrast to those scholars who prefer the word 'ethnocide,' the underlying conceptual contention is that the term 'cultural genocide' simply describes a key method of genocide and should be viewed, without the need for qualification, as genocide. While direct physical killing and genocidal child removal practices may have ceased in Australia, some indigenous activists persuasively contend that genocide is a continuing process in an Australia that has failed to decolonise. Concurring with these views the article argues that the contemporary expression of continuing genocidal relations in Australia can be seen principally, and perversely, in the colonial state's official reconciliation process, native title land rights regime and the recent interventionist 'solutions' to indigenous 'problems' in the Northern Territory.     

The firm as citizen? Social responsibility of business in Australia

A model of corporate citizenship is advanced with the help of research on United Kingdom business responses to mass unemployment. This model suggests the need to review our theories of the firm and to widen assumptions about the political role of business. Australian findings, both of the institutionalisation of social responsibility in some large firms and of the emergence of a new sort of business community organisation, fit the citizenship model. Explanations and implications of the findings are considered.     

The Impact of AIDS on Rural Households in Africa: A Shock Like Any Other?

In areas where HIV prevalence is high, household production can be significantly affected and the integrity of households compromised. Yet policy responses to the impact of HIV/AIDS have been muted in comparison to outcomes of other shocks, such as drought or complex political emergencies. This article looks at the reasons for the apparent under–reaction to AIDS, using data from Zambia, and examines recent calls to mitigate the effects of AIDS at household level. Critical consideration is directed at proposals relating to community safety nets, micro–finance and the mainstreaming of AIDS within larger poverty alleviation programmes. It is argued that effective initiatives must attend to the specific features of AIDS, incorporating both an assault on those inequalities which drive the epidemic and sensitivity to the staging of AIDS both across and within households. A multi–pronged approach is advocated which is addressed not just at mitigation or prevention, but also at emergency relief, rehabilitation and development.     

The Development of Environmental Administration in Queensland and Western Australia: Why are they Different?

Western Australia and Queensland are often seen as the most developmentalist states in the Australian federation, largely because they remained less developed for longer and have seen much mineral and agricultural development in the latter part of the twentieth century. Developmentalism is usually seen as anathema to a commitment to environmental policy, which most states have taken on in response to environmentalism in the same period, yet these two developmentalist states exhibit markedly different trajectories in response to this environmentalist stimulus. This paper explores the reasons for these differences, finding a variety of causal factors including both socioeconomic influences (such as affluence and demographics), political structures, and personalities and the force of ideas. It suggests that we should be wary of monocausal explanations of such differences.     

Thailand: The Making of a Miracle?

Over the last half century, Thailand has been one of the fastest growing developing countries. This article reviews the causes of that growth. It deals both with the immediate factors, in a growth accounting framework, and with the underlying social and political factors. The author reaches the conclusion that a dynamic entrepreneurial class together with a supportive state were the key elements in Thailand’s rapid and efficient accumulation of production factors. Although in this respect Thailand is similar to a small number of other East Asian countries, the Thai case also has a number of unique characteristics.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

Predictors of Out-of-Home Placement in a Family Preservation Program: Are Welfare Recipients Particularly Vulnerable?

Participants in a statewide family preservation program were classified on the basis of income level and enrollment in public assistance. These variables, along with other economic, parent, and child risk factors, were used to predict the probability of out-of-home placements at the close of this intervention program. Results revealed that neither low income nor receiving public assistance was predictive of having a child removed from the home. Higher levels of child-centered risk and parent-centered risk were the only consistent predictors of placement outcomes. Additional analyses revealed that family characteristics (e.g., history of psychiatric care, prior child placements, and involvement with the legal system) also were typical of families experiencing out-of-home placements. This study challenges the stereotype of low-income or welfare families being at greater risk of having a child removed from their home. Findings are discussed in the context of recent welfare reform initiatives and implications for future family policy research.