Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane's experiment in press freedom: A quantitative evaluation through media system dependency

ABSTRACT

The relatively isolated circumstances of colonial Australia provide a natural laboratory for examining the establishment of press freedom there in 1824. A quantitative content analysis of newspapers from 1821 to 1825, guided by media system dependency (MSD) theory, suggests publishers were more concerned with exploiting the end of their dependence on the government as censor than with addressing their remaining dependence on the government as a well-funded advertiser. Findings also reveal considerable variation among publications and between colonies. The analysis also demonstrates the value of MSD theory in historical research.     

The Changing Geographies of Power and Control in Rural Service Provision: Recent Restructuring Within the Australian Tractor Dealership System

Over the past few years a considerable body of research has illuminated the changing geographies of service provision in rural Australia. Mostly, this work has emphasised the quantitative aspects of restructuring, by way of documenting numerical reductions in service delivery points and their implications for local employment and service access. In this paper, an examination of recent restructuring within the dealership system for high‐horsepower tractors underlines that these quantitative changes also intersect with qualitative shifts to the character of service delivery. Interviews with 31 participants in the tractor dealership system of Central‐West New South Wales reveal the recent evolution of a producer‐driven supply chain in which two dominant, multinational, tractor‐machinery companies have sought to exercise tighter control over customer relations through the restructuring of franchise agreements with dealers. There has been a resultant demise of the independent dealership, and its replacement by a system of standardised, company‐affiliated outlets operated by franchise holders. Hence, the spatial restructuring of this industry represents the surface manifestations of corporate strategies in which large economic entities are re‐organising their interests in light of globalised theatres of competition and profit. In this sense, the tractor‐dealership system is emblematic of changes to power and control in rural service provision as the franchise models propagated by large corporate interests increasingly subsume the small‐business sector activities of Australia's rural towns.     

The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle: On the Limits of Time Use Surveys

Almost every intervention in the field of international agricultural development — from microcredit finance to fertilizer subsidies to trade policy — has come to recognize gender, and relationships within households, as important. Yet most interventions continue to treat the household as a ‘black box’, with changes within the household measured by the effects on income, anthropometry, health, or other secondary metrics within bargaining models. In this context, there has been increasing interest in time use studies as a way to peer inside this black box. This article offers a review of methods and identifies some of the difficulties facing time use studies in capturing intrahousehold dynamics, and presents the results of a two‐season simultaneous activity time use study in Malawi which aimed to address these difficulties. The results suggest significant limitations to time use surveys. The kinds of reproductive labour that often interest researchers may be invisible to the women responding to time use surveys, with the result that care work is dramatically under‐reported. The authors discuss the implications of the divergence between researchers’ concerns and the women's reports of their lives for time use surveys, and for feminist development research methods more broadly.     

Does working long hours cause marital dissolution? Evidence from the reduction in South Korea's workweek standard

Despite its important implications, little is known about the possible impact on marital dissolution of workweek standards, which set the maximum working hours for full-time workers and may, therefore, reduce their likelihood of working long hours. Moreover, evidence on the effect of working hours on marital dissolution comes predominantly from non-causal studies on Western women's work status. The Korean government reduced its workweek standard from 44 to 40 hours between 2004 and 2011. A discrete-time event history analysis of longitudinal data from the 2000 to 2015 Korea Labor and Income Panel Study shows that this reduction lowered male workers’ risk of divorce. The estimated effect is large in absolute size, and we speculate about possible explanations. We cautiously call for further attention to be paid to the plausible causal link between men's overwork and marital dissolution in the work-oriented and gender-divided East Asian societies.     

A seventeenth-century trade gun and associated collection from Pine Island,Alabama

A set of artifacts, apparently associated with human remains (one tooth), from Pine Island, Alabama, was donated to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in 1915. In preparation for repatriation, this collection was investigated extensively by a volunteer team. This paper reports the results of this analysis, focusing especially on a new type of trade gun and the glass beads. The goal of the research is to provide an accurate date for the collection to assist in identifying the Native American group represented.     

Transforming the landscape: Cistercian nuns and the environment in the medieval Low Countries

This article investigates the extent to which women’s monastic communities intervened in the natural landscape of the southern Low Countries in the Middle Ages, irrevocably transforming the environment in their efforts to support their communities. Focusing on the county of Flanders in particular, it contributes to an expanding historiography that traces the impact of human intervention on the natural world in the pre-modern period. Simultaneously, it offers a glimpse into a world where religious women worked alongside their male counterparts, challenging past notions about how gender shaped monasticism in the Middle Ages. While scholars have often noted the role of monastic communities in reclamation activities, this article makes a unique contribution by inserting Cistercian nuns into the narrative, ultimately producing a more inclusive and more accurate understanding of monastic experience in the Middle Ages.     

Understanding the Vancouver Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Cluster: A Case Study of Public Laboratories and Private Research‡

Conventional analyses of conventional industrial clusters look at the local, regional,1 In this paper “regional” refers to a sub-national entity, such as a state, province, state or collectivity of a few provinces or states. View all notes national and global factors affecting their ability to compete and grow. However, it is beginning to become apparent that in at least a few cutting-edge, high-technology areas, firms compete directly on a global basis for talent and markets. A case study of the fuel cell cluster in Vancouver, Canada appears to confirm this proposition. Policy makers have realized that this cluster must compete on the world market if it is to succeed. The cluster is endowed with several favourable factors including a high quality of life for its human capital and strong support for demonstration projects.