Spatial distribution of innovation networks,technological competencies and degree of novelty in emerging economy firms

This paper analyses the relationship of the accumulation of technological competencies at the firm level, the spatial distribution of the firm's innovation networks and the degree of novelty of product innovation. Firm-based primary data collected in two innovative regions in emerging economies are used to predict higher degrees of novelty in emerging economy firms. Similarly to advanced economy firms, the results show that international linkages are associated with higher degrees of novelty. However, new-to-the-world innovation in emerging country firms is fundamentally externally driven, suggesting that international linkages seem to be a compensating mechanism for the initially lower technological capabilities rather than a complementary source of knowledge.     

‘Remember the Sabbath’: a history of technological decisions and innovation in Orthodox Jewish communities

ABSTRACT

The relationship of Modern Orthodox Jewish communities to technology is mediated by the calendar, following requirements to keep the Sabbath holy. As nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twentyfirst-century inventions reshaped work, public spaces, and domestic living, rabbis intensely debated whether, how, and why observant Jewish people should avoid using electric switches, kitchen appliances, elevators, and other everyday devices on the Sabbath. To justify their decisions, rabbis interrogated minute technical details of these objects. Sabbath prohibitions promoted innovation, as rabbis collaborated with Jewish engineers to create what they judged to be Sabbath-compliant adaptions of everyday technologies. Given that prominent rabbis often disagreed about proper technology use on the Sabbath, Jewish families had the opportunity to decide for themselves what counted as authentic devotion in handling personal and domestic technologies.     

Network position and innovation capability in the regional innovation network

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the positioning of actors characterized by different natures in a regional innovation network and explores how these actors improve their innovation capabilities by assuming prominence or brokering positions. Innovation capability is widely seen to be the driving force in building regional competitive advantage, therefore investigating how the positioning of actors improves their innovation-related activities is relevant in terms of regional competitiveness. This paper builds on a survey conducted on the Sicilian regional area in Italy. A questionnaire was used to collect data concerning the relationships established between actors and the extent to which these relationships impact actors’ innovation capability. Results suggest that regional actors cannot be considered as a homogeneous group regarding their positioning in a regional network and that the innovation benefits of assuming different network positions depend on their nature. This paper offers some theoretical implications to the literature on regional innovation network and practical suggestions to organizations and regional policy makers.     

Making sense of Marx

It is this question which occupied Hannah Arendt throughout most of her life, and which will form the crux of this article. I wish to explore whether critical thought holds the potential to rescue us from the crisis of the ‘moral point of no return’, by allowing us to recognise it. Arendt, and later Zygmunt Bauman, call for critical thinking as a way out of evil. Critical thought being something that they conflate with morality. They both attempt to demonstrate the decline of morality and its separation from legality/rationality under modernity. Bauman needs these assumptions to show how cold rationality eclipses morality and his subsequent appeal to persistent, but not socially grounded individual morality as remedy. For Arendt, the perceived lack of thought by the ‘perpetrators’ lays the foundation of her call to critical thinking as remedy; but similarly heralds a process of pure ethics. This article argues that although they both argue for more morality, morality cannot in fact disappear.     

The Market, Marx and Sustainability in a Fishery

A management system of individual transferable quotas was introduced in the Tasmanian commercial rock lobster fishery in 1998. The market for quota units has since become increasingly capitalised. Fishers without substantial wealth find it difficult to participate in this market. Instead, investors purchase quota units. Consequently, fishery managers are somewhat disillusioned with the hidden hand of the market and are seeking a different way to conceptualise what is happening in the fishery. Marx's writings on the hidden abode of production suggest one such way. I bring Marx's work together with quota management and the views of participants as an alternative way of framing these changes in the fishery.     

Looking back: Marx and Bellamy1

No two images of socialism or utopia were more influential a century ago than those of Marx and Bellamy. Marx and Engels famously denied the utopian dimension of their own project; Bellamy celebrated it. In this essay I sketch out some clues for revisiting images of utopia in Marx and in Bellamy. My claim is that Marx failed to develop a systematic utopia or image of socialism. We are left with a series of hints towards five different images of utopia across the path of his life and work. Bellamy's image of utopia is more consistent, but contrary to common understanding, it reflects the unresolved tensions of nineteenth century American modernity expressed through the prism of New England small town radicalism. Bellamy's utopia is connected to the later image of the machine in the garden; contrary to William Morris's assertion, he was not an unmixed modern, and this is one quality at least that he shared with Marx, where the impress of romanticism remains profound.     

Political science,the state and Marx

Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (translated by Timothy O'Hagan), New Left Books & Sheed and Ward, London, 1973, pp. 367, $15.25.