Book reviews

Shahrgara'i va Shahrnishini dar Iran (bih Inzimam‐i Muqic‐iyyat va Naqsh‐i Tehran). By Mehdi Amani. Tehran: University of Tehran, Institute for Social Studies and Research, 1350/1971. 80 pp. No price indicated.

Migration in Iran: A Quantitative Approach. By Mohammad Hemmasi. Shiraz: Pahlavi University Publications #48, 1974. 144 pp. 150R1s.

The Origins of the ?afawids: ?i^cism, ?ūfism, and the Gulat. By Michel M. Mazzaoui. Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1972. viii + 85 pp. DM 28.00.

Social and Cultural Selections From Contemporary Persian. With notes, exercises, and an alphabetical word list by Michel M. Mazzaoui and William G. Millward. Delmar New York: Caravan Books, 1973. xi + 128 pp. $7.50.     

Developing cross-industry innovation capability: regional drivers and indicators within firms

ABSTRACT

The role of firms in the process of regional renewal and path development is a somewhat neglected area in the existing literature. With few exceptions, the literature is mainly concerned with aggregated development paths. To cover this gap, the current study turns its attention to cross-industry innovation capability (CIIC) building in firms and discusses how conditions for innovation and learning in a region drive this process. We introduce a new concept of CIIC – that is, the firm’s ability to transform knowledge and ideas from different industries into new products, processes and systems and/or its ability to adapt existing products, processes and systems to new industries – and identify its drivers and indicators. The discussion is supported by empirical studies of firms in three Norwegian case regions that undergo the restructuring process due to the recent severe decrease in oil prices. Our empirical data demonstrate that organizationally thick and diversified regions are more favourable for firms’ abilities to develop CIIC and cross-industry innovation activity. As a result, we emphasize that future regional policies should have a stronger focus on the linkages between internal firm characteristics and regional innovation systems to contribute to the firms’ absorptive capacity for developing cross-industry innovation.     

From the Ground Up: Agency,Practice, and Community in the Southwestern British Bronze Age

Embodied, sensual, engagements between people, earthly elements, and celestial bodies during focused, periodic acts of ritual construction and artifact deposition in the southwestern British Bronze Age resulted in the remaking of identities, local communities, symbolic/mythical knowledge, and the landscape itself. To appreciate how material culture, time, and space were employed to define the criteria by which people understood themselves and their world necessitates an archaeological focus upon shared practices in particular settings that served to define rules of engagement with the environment based upon shared human perceptions. Agency appears in this encounter as central in the construction and perpetuation of symbolic perception, shared social memory, and community identity.     

St-Germain des-Prés, St Vincent and the martyrs of Cordoba

The Translatio Georgii, Aurelii et Nathaliae , in which Aimoin recounts the journey of Usuard of St-Germain to Cordoba in search of relics, and the use which Usuard made of Spanish material in his Martyrology , reveal many inconsistencies. These are explained, by comparing these texts with Aimoins's Translatio Beati Vincentii and other evidence for St-Germain, as the result of attempts to bolster the monastery's standing with Charles the Bald at a time of political difficulty.     

Bridging Positivist and Interpretivist Approaches to Qualitative Methods

The usual juxtaposition of qualitative research against quantitative research makes it easy to miss the fact that qualitative research itself encompasses at least two traditions: positivist and interpretivist. Positivist work seeks to identify qualitative data with propositions that can then be tested or identified in other cases, while interpretive work seeks to combine those data into systems of belief whose manifestations are specific to a case. In this paper, I argue that discovering causal relationships is the province of positivist research, while discovering causal mechanisms is the province of interpretivists. I explain why absolutist claims for one or the other approach are mistaken, and argue that the combination of both makes more sense. Finally, I offer suggestions for combinations of positivist and interpretive work, both at the level of thought experiment and in actual data collection and analysis. Throughout, I draw my examples from recent studies of poverty, a field in which a small but distinguished tradition of qualitative studies of the poor has been joined by a growing body of both positivist and interpretive work.