Understanding local innovation systems in peripheral tourism destinations

Tourism destinations in peripheral areas are often large regions established by centralised government agencies to encourage collaboration between dispersed communities and foster innovation. Relatively little research attention has been paid to the impact that centrally defined destination boundaries have on whether and how small communities contribute to innovation at a regional level. This paper examines the case of Burra, a small town in rural South Australia. It analyses the networking, collaboration and knowledge exchange behaviour of tourism stakeholders in the context of the state-government-defined ‘Clare Valley’ tourism region. Data were drawn from a web-based social network analysis, in-depth interviews, historic document analysis and field observations. The study found that the local tourism system had limited aspirations and capabilities to collaborate with other towns in the region. Lack of regional engagement was only partially due to intra-regional competition and resistance to regional boundaries. More significant barriers included a local culture of operating in isolation, an embedded reliance on public sector leadership to manage systemic interactions, an aging system with limited ambition to change and an inability to harness in-migrants and externally based stakeholders to stimulate knowledge transfer. Changing the imposed destination boundaries would have limited impact on the operation of the local system. The paper concludes that effective regional destination development in peripheral areas needs to be better informed by more detailed understandings of local tourism systems and their capacities to engage.     

A SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF SECTORAL VARIATIONS IN RETURNS TO EXTERNAL SCALE

ABSTRACT.  This paper reports results of spatially explicit analyses of external scale effects across a variety of sectors, including manufacturing. Using data from New England counties, earnings are found to exhibit increasing returns to urbanization in every sector. Returns to sectoral localization are mixed, however, with increasing returns in one sector, constant returns in five sectors, and decreasing returns in two sectors. External scale effects are fairly confined in their spatial extent, with only retailing and services particularly marked by spillover effects from neighboring counties.     

The IGY and the ice sheet: surveying Antarctica

This paper considers the significance of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the development of new knowledge of the shape of the Antarctic bed surface and the ice sheet that covers it. It also situates the Antarctic geophysical work done during the IGY within a longer history that begins in the immediate post-WWII period and extends up to the 1970s. The paper pays particular attention to the US IGY seismic traverses, which were the centrepiece of US IGY activities in Antarctica. We argue that these traverses should be understood as part of a broader set of geopolitical, military and governmental strategies that the USA pursued through the IGY and afterwards. In this sense we agree with other students of Cold War science who suggest that the IGY was far from being the beginning of the end for geopolitics in Antarctica. Instead we demonstrate that US scientific activities in Antarctica during the IGY and after were a form of geopolitics in themselves.     

Theft and Gender in Late Medieval Bologna

This article aims to challenge the prevalent presentation and analysis of gender in studies of theft in the Middle Ages. Female thieving is usually differentiated from men's – by motivation and mode, by venue and value – and these differences are related either to women's physical inferiority or to their nurturing roles (thieving to support the domestic economy) or to inequalities of access to such elements as weapons (for robbery) or tools (for burglary). When studying theft, historians have focused on male thieving as the norm, and they have tended to differentiate thieving according to gender: women mainly commit petty theft, often for immediate consumption, and do not steal on the highways, in gangs or with weapons and violence. Men, on the other hand, operate in groups: their motivation is more diverse and they use a more varied repertoire of modus operandi, which includes highway robbery. To re‐examine these characterisations, I have taken data from three twenty‐year periods from the criminal court of the city of Bologna in northern Italy (one of the most complete series of judicial records for the period). These yield a total of over 700 prosecutions and over 1,300 accused. The focus of the analysis is on elements of differentiation, such as the numbers of individual and gang thefts, the nature of goods stolen, the use of violence, et cetera. These show that, while there was some differentiation between male and female thieving, this was mainly quantitative, and that qualitatively there were more shared features of behaviour. What are often seen to be the distinguishing features of male thieving – robbery, violence, gangs, professionals – turn out to be a small, untypical group. What is often seen to be the distinguishing features of female thieving – petty theft for immediate consumption – turns out to be equally or more true of male theft.     

Queer history

Book reviewed in this article:
Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference . By Scott Bravmann     

Environmental Justice Meets Risk‐Class: The Relational Distribution of Environmental Bads

Recent treatments of environmental justice have highlighted the need to move beyond focusing upon inequalities in the distribution of environmental risks to address other aspects of environmental injustice, including unequal participation and recognition. While acknowledging the importance of extending environmental justice to include these other dimensions of justice, this paper argues that more, not less, analytical attention needs to be devoted to the diverse logics of distribution of environmental risks. In light of continuing dilemmas associated with whether environmental inequalities can be just or, alternatively, that environmental inequality and injustice are co‐extensive, this paper proposes to untangle some key connections between environmental inequalities and injustice through a critical confrontation of environmental justice with risk‐class analysis. Focusing on the positional or relational distribution of environmental bads as analysed in risk‐class analysis, this paper argues that bringing these two bodies of knowledge together can illuminate how relational inequalities have characteristics that make them particularly illegitimate from a justice perspective, thus making an advance in identifying key connections between environmental inequality and injustice.