Migration and the location of MNE activities: Evidence from Italian provinces

We investigate the migration-inward foreign direct investment (FDI) nexus in narrow geographies. A novel two-stage empirical strategy allows us to investigate the role of migration as a determinant of multinational enterprises (MNEs) location choices and unpick heterogeneity in foreign investors' preferences towards the presence of migrants in the host location. This allows us to shed light on the relative importance of the underlying mechanisms linking migration and inward FDI. Relying on 1113 greenfield investments by 895 MNEs in Italian NUTS3 regions over 2003–2015, we find that immigrants from the country of origin of the investor exert a positive but highly heterogeneous effect on MNE location choices. Investors are more sensitive to the presence of migrants from their country of origin when they lack experience in the destination country (first-time investors) and when their investments concern market-access or business-services (downstream) activities. This is consistent with the view that migrants act as information brokers that bridge the fixed costs of international business activities.     

Cultural policies in cities of the ‘global South’: a multi-scalar approach

ABSTRACT

Building on the literature on global cities and on the worlding of cities, the articles in this special issue chart how cities outside Europe and North America try to reinvent and rescale themselves using culture. They suggest that the fabric of urban cultural policy is embedded in multi-scalar power dynamics. First, the contributions in this special issue reveal the importance of circulating standards across borders in structuring narratives about urban history, heritage and identity, in conjunction with local actors’ interests. Second, the diffusion of hegemonic cultural policy models such as the “creative city” leads to logics of exclusion, gentrification, and has been met with resistance, which suggest that these models can be to the detriment of local residents, despite the progressive values they are often claim to promote. Third, this special issue points to the need to rethink the politics of cultural policy mobility and offers conceptual tools such as vernacularization to make sense of the ways in which urban elites navigate, negotiate and take advantage of circulating cultural policy models.     

Inhabiting a risky earth: The Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 and its impacts (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland in 2010 caused havoc to global air traffic. This article examines that event by looking at theories of risk and culture. We demonstrate the fragility of today's mobilities, which depend on unpredictable nature as well as complex technological systems. A new type of risk was revealed by the eruption, which has since become a feature of cultural risk portfolios in contemporary society.     

Fuelwood collection as daily practice: a wood charcoal study for the colonial period North Carolina Piedmont

ABSTRACT

European colonization brought innumerable changes and choices to Native groups across the Southeast. Scholars continue to examine the various ways communities navigated these disruptions. Studying the remains of daily practice offers a window into how communities negotiated continuity and change. Wood charcoal, representing the remains of daily fires, provides an important, but underutilized, method for examining people’s daily routines and interactions with their surrounding landscapes. This paper examines wood charcoal assemblages from several sites in the North Carolina Piedmont that span the precontact to early colonial periods (AD 1400–1705). Fuelwood collection models are used to consider the environments, practices, and preferences that influenced the composition of wood charcoal assemblages. Comparison of these datasets shows a consistent significant pattern of high-quality fuelwood selection with additional patterns potentially related to long-term use of the same environment and factors related to colonialism. Altogether, these patterns suggest continuity of some daily practices despite disruptions to other aspects of life.     

Phaedrus’ Cicadas: Patrizi's Dialoghi and vernacular rhetoric

ABSTRACT

In his Dieci dialoghi della retorica (Venice, 1562), Francesco Patrizi analyses the nature of language and the historical developments of oratory, taking part in the debate on this art reinforced by the spread of the Aristotelian Rhetoric. This gave him the opportunity to consider the origins of human social life and explain the traditional rhetorical teaching in an anthropological perspective. He also argued against the civic use of oratory as presented in some contemporary treatises on it, written in the vernacular.