Firm Heterogeneity in Biotech: Absorptive Capacity,Strategies and Local-Regional Connections

This paper focuses on the characteristics of biotech firms with various levels of research and development (R&D) activity. It is done by exploring the relationship between R&D intensity, alliances and the extent of regionalization of firms' activities using evidence from a survey of US-based biotechnology firms. We profile two firm prototypes: research-oriented firms and product-oriented firms, focusing on their characteristics, strategies and operations. These include activities devoted to exploration and exploitation through alliances with universities (more exploration) and with pharmaceutical companies (exploration and exploitation), and locational needs which facilitate both exploration and exploitation.     

Yanjin on the Tea-Horse Trade

Fetching salt water from wells, digging a saltwater pond, putting up salt shelters, and sun-drying the water to produce saltThis is the traditional way of making salt still adopted by many people in Yanjin.Yanjin in Mangkang County is so named to match the fact that the area is filled with yan (salt) jin (wells).During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a county was set up here to supervise salt production. According to Records of Yanjin County, there were some 50 salt wells in Yanjin at that time. They     

Chokepoint: Regulating US student mobility through biometrics

Many US public schools, struggling with perceived issues of safety and security, have installed a host of different biometric devices – vein scanners, automated fingerprint identification systems, iris scanners, GPS-enabled identification badges, and facial recognition software. Schools turn to these devices in hopes of securing school space by sorting and tracking students, visitors, and school staff based on their pre-determined risk profiles. As such, this article proposes that tracing these new forms of school security provides insight into how the politics and practices of biometric technologies are fundamentally geographical in nature. That is, biometric devices not only verify identity according to risk assessments, they also work to manage mobility by regulating where school bodies can go, when, and for what purposes. Moreover, this article analyzes how these risk profiling tactics, widely adopted by schools across the United States, necessarily borrow from the strategies used in sites of colonial occupation. Looking at schools in this way can help us plot how biometric bordering and resultant security decisions unfold at other sites of mobility beyond state (smart) borders, highways, toll booths, and ports of entry in order to formulate new “spaces of enclosure” (Amoore, Marmura, & Salter, 2008) and “dividing practices” (Nevins, 2002), thus bringing students into “closer proximity” to military relations of force through these “war-like architectures” (Amoore, 2009).     

After Seattle: Free Trade and the WTO

After the debacle in Seattle at the WTO Ministerial meeting in 1999, when the member countries failed to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations, new challenges to both free trade and the WTO have acquired importance. The former can be met by confronting the conceptual confusions, unfounded fears and policy-design sloppiness that afflict many of the demands of the critics. The latter, however, require changes in the WTO's functioning. But a distinction must be made among three areas: trade negotiations, the secretariat's work, and the dispute settlement mechanism. Each requires a different treatment.     

Regulating Investment Abroad: The Political Economy of the Regionalization of Singaporean Firms

This paper attempts to understand the regionalization of national firms from Singapore within the methodological construct of the regulationist perspective. It aims to demonstrate the usefulness of some concepts in the regulationist perspective for explaining restructuring processes in developing countries, and to evaluate critically the role of some of these concepts—such as regimes of accumulation and modes of social regulation—in illuminating the internationalization of capital through transnational corporations and their associated foreign direct investment. In particular, the paper argues that Singapore's export-led regime of accumulation manifests inherent contradictions in its dependence on foreign capital, the domination of the domestic economy by state-owned enterprises, and the relative underdevelopment of indigenous entrepreneurship. While this accumulation process was embedded in an earlier set of social and institutional mechanisms, its contradictions and tensions were not appropriately regulated and contained. When Singapore experienced two major external economic crises in the mid-1970s and 1985, these shocks and their internal tensions triggered a continuous process of economic restructuring regulated by a distinct combination of social and institutional mechanisms, or "fixes." One such institutional fix in recent years has been the promotion of the regionalization of Singaporean firms through the social regulation of local labor markets and the state-led establishment of institutions to facilitate the regionalization drive.     

统制经济与国营贸易——太平洋战争爆发后复兴商业公司的经营活动

复兴商业公司是贸易委员会属下规模最大后来也是唯一的一家国营贸易公司,是负责执行战时统购统销、易货偿债政策的重要机构。本文充分利用贸易委员会等机构的源文件,深入分析太平洋战争爆发后公司的经营活动,包括对外贸易政策上的应变、人事上的调整、国营公司的改组与合并、资金的运营以及易货偿债的执行等具体内容,并以复兴商业公司为例,对于战时国民政府推行统制经济政策的得失以及国营公司所承担的作用予以客观的评价。     

Regulating sex work in the EU: prostitute women and the new spaces of exclusion

Contemporary prostitution policy within the European Union has coalesced around the view that female prostitution is rarely voluntary, and often a consequence of sex trafficking. Responding, different nation-states have, however, adopted antithetical legal positions based on prohibition (Sweden), abolition (UK) or legalisation (Netherlands). Despite the apparently sharp differences between these positions, in this article we argue that there is now a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of street prostitution. Noting the forms of exploitation that nonetheless adhere to many spaces of off-street work, we conclude that the state and law may intervene in sex work markets with the intention of tackling gendered injustice, but are perpetuating geographies of exception and abandonment.     

Protocol,politics and popular culture: the independence jubilee in Gabon

National days are powerful moments of commemoration that aim at renewing the citizens' bonds to the nation and the state. In order to be successful, public rituals need to draw large audiences, and their ceremonial design therefore has to be adapted to suit the masses, employing elements of popular culture and everyday forms of nationhood. Despite drawing its significance from the declaration of independence in 1960, however, Gabon's independence jubilee was less concerned with history and commemoration than with celebrating the state and the nation in the present. The ceremonial design of Gabon's jubilee featured intensive preparations, official ceremonies, popular festivities and symbolic politics. In this article, I look at why history and commemoration played such an unimportant role during the celebrations and how Gabon's jubilee organisers included official as well as popular forms of nationhood to assure the population's participation.     

论美英高等教育大众化及其社会调控作用

高等教育大众化是当代教育的重要发展趋势。教育的社会功能亦由此丰富深化。它不仅以教学和科研成为社会经济发展的“动力加速器”,也因大众化逐渐产生一些调节社会关系和控制社会矛盾的作用。高等教育已构成现代国家调控机制中的新兴组成部分①。对这种调控作用需要更多...     

Trade and peace: the EU and Gaddafi's final decade

This article examines the effectiveness of the EU's use of trade to induce peace in Libya during Gaddafi's final ten years in power, between 2001 and 2011. During this period, the EU implored and reiterated through rhetoric, policy and the exchange of goods and services that trade was to be used as a tool to maintain peace and prevent conflict. Indeed, this peace‐through‐trade assumption is at the heart of the EU, which was founded on the notion that economic interdependence ameliorates potential causes of conflict. Initially, this article embeds its argument in the theory concerned with the relationship between trade and peace, followed by tracking the development of the EU's policy. The main body of the article then provides evidence which goes against the assumption that the trade–peace relationship is positively correlated. Specifically, it is argued that the EU's peace‐through‐trade policy failed in this instance due to the fact that it failed to take into account the Libyan context: namely, the Middle Eastern state's ethnographic and historical makeup; the weapons of mass‐destruction programme and the subsequently induced sanctions; Gaddafi's rule and attempts at reform; as well as the 2011 conflict. All these factors amalgamated to ongoing conflict in Libya during Gaddafi's final decade in power despite EU–Libyan trade continuing to take place during this timeframe.     

农业的全球化：大米贸易的警示

近年来 ,全球化问题是国际和国内社会科学许多领域讨论得最热烈的话题之一。占统治地位的观点认为 :全球化和世界体系是从近代开始的 ,这一体系以西欧资本主义为中心 ,向边缘地区、次边缘地区发散 ;或者 ,资本主义世界体系把世界划分为主宰国家和附属国家 ,等等。总之 ,这种观点认为 ,世界体系的中心是欧洲和北美。贡德·弗兰克的《白银资本》对这一占统治地位的观点提出挑战 ,认为整体的世界体系不是从资本主义开始的 ,它在很早以前就存在了 ;它不是存在五百年 ,而是五千年。他通过研究 1 6 40年的世界史 ,特别是围绕白银资本在一些国家所产生的作用 ,认为那个时候 ,世界体系的中心不是在西方 ,而是在东方。无独有偶 ,现任美国农业历史学会主席彼得·考克莱尼斯也对这一传统观点提出了挑战 ,但是 ,他论点的提出是建立在更有充分论据的基础上。他赞同《共产党宣言》中马克思和恩格斯关于资本主义对全球一体化产生了积极作用的观点 ,但是 ,他进一步认为 ,全球化是一个非常复杂的问题。他通过对世界一体化大米市场形成历史的考察 ,提出 :全球化问题不是一个新问题 ,它已有很长的历史 ;今天工业和服务业的全球化似乎是重复和再现很久以前农业全球化的现象 ;而且 ,全球化进程中国家对国家的影响不是单方向的     

日本对外贸易政策的新动向--关于区域自由贸易协定的几点议论

日本与新加坡签署自由贸易协定,表明其对外贸易政策发生了一些变化,它有别于日本一贯主张的“多边主义”,这一变化是建立在对多边贸易政策和区域协定重新认识基础之上的,表现为日本积极参与区域协定的具体行动上,其意图是适应外部环境变化以解决自身的经济问题。     

1924年《中俄协定》与中俄旧约废止问题--以《密件议定书》为中心的探讨

1917年俄国革命后,两次发表对华宣言,自愿废除不平等旧约,平等对待中国。北京政府虽不愿立即承认苏联,但乘机清理旧俄在华条约特权。中苏谈判时,苏方坚持无条件建交后,再开会议订定新约取代旧约,北京政府则担心中俄会议不一定会有结果,坚持要立即废止旧约。最后双方妥协,在1924年《中俄协定》中,以《密件议定书》规定:新约未订定前,旧约概不施行。后来中俄会议虽经召开,但未获致具体成果,使得中俄旧约处于虽未废止,但不施行的含混状态。北京政府在移交俄国使馆及其他有关交涉中,均坚持中俄旧约已废,并持续推动其“修约外交”。     

On the Question of Regulating the Level of the Caspian Sea

The author tries to show that the level of the Caspian Sea could be stabilized at relatively low cost at its present low level without further damage to the coastal economy. He denies the need for costly projects designed to increase the inflow into the Caspian or to separate the shallow northern section from the main body of the sea. He maintains that water gained by diverting the northern streams into the Volga basin should be used to irrigate the arid Southeast rather than to replenish the water supply of the Caspian Sea.