An Evolutionary View of Policy Network Management

This paper examines successful policy network (henceforth PN) practices in the Basque Country over an 18-year period, in relation to Cluster Associations, Quality Promotion and Local Agenda 21 Promotion. Basing our work on the Basque experience and on previous multi-disciplinary knowledge regarding learning processes, networking management and marketing, we contribute new insights that help to understand how PN management evolves. The need to analyse PN from an evolutionary perspective has been pinpointed by the various traditions of network research as one of the main gaps in the study of networking. Our research shows that expertise in PN management is generated through a long, performance-oriented dilemma-solving process that takes place in time and space. The first experiences provide initial knowledge and absorptive capacity, both of which improve through new and diverse experiences of increasing complexity. Step by step, a quantity of tacit and codified knowledge is created and shared, mainly through face-to-face contact, within the territory. Finally, the knowledge achieved is substantially similar to the normative knowledge that, though sparse, can be found in various networking literatures and needs to be brought together. But we also suggest that more emphasis on PN marketing is needed.     

Bridging the Social and Digital Divides in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala: A Capabilities Approach

Combining empirical evidence with Amartya Sen's concept of capabilities, this article argues that the digital divide is not merely a problem of access to ICTs. It is part of a larger developmental problem in which vast sections of the world's population are deprived of the capabilities to use ICTs, acquire information and convert information into useful knowledge. Fieldwork research including sample surveys conducted in rural locations in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh in India shows that these capabilities can only be created through large‐scale complementary interventions in economic and social development.     

Bundled Worlds: The Roles and Interactions of Complex Objects from the North American Plains

This paper explores the many dimensions of power exercised by ceremonial bundles that have been held by North American Plains groups since time immemorial. Because bundles are multifarious but strictly ordered sets of objects, they embody the corpus of ecological and cosmological knowledge needed to survive in the human and supernatural worlds. Bundles, like persons, are subject to hierarchical and heterarchical power relations that parallel societal relations within tribal groups. Observations are drawn about the value of studying complex objects such as bundles for expanding and refining archaeological systematics.     

Symposium international Galileo 2001 Tenerife, February 19–23, 2001

Vie Scientifique

Symposium international Galileo 2001 Tenerife, February 19–23, 2001     

Cernuda,poeta de un sur imposible

This article examines the poetics that Luis Cernuda developed throughout his life in connection with its sublime illusion of a genuine Spanish south through the romantic recreation he made of his native Seville, in several texts written from exile: they are various poems of The Reality and Desire and the essays Digressions on Romantic Andalusia and History of a Book, and, above all, the autobiographical prints from Ocnos, in which Albanio's sensitive experiences reflect both the meditative elegance of Cernuda's childhood and adolescence and the utopian promise of a true relationship with the world beyond the social hypocrisy of bourgeois capitalism and the coercion of Franco's dictatorship. My intention in this article is to weave innovatively, in a consistent and documented way, the biographical events with the artistic intentions of the poet, to reveal original interpretive links between desolate reality and the desire for transcendence in his strange lyrics.     

Nunc autem a Gothis subversa: the province of Alicante and the Spanish Mediterranean towns between the Byzantine and Visigothic periods

The transition between the sixth and the seventh centuries in the towns of Iberia has been a matter of much discussion, leading to the development of the ‘urban renewal’ model, by which the Visigothic process of state formation generated a new urban munificence. A similar process can be seen in the towns of the Byzantine area, and our aim is to discuss the evolution of the urban settlements of the modern province of Alicante, reassessing the available evidence and comparing it with the models proposed for the Byzantine and Visigothic areas.     

Global Metropolitan-Regional Scale in Evolution: Metropolitan Intermediary Cities and Metropolitan Cities

The case of Madrid is used as empirical focus to propose a new classification of the metropolitan region urban medium-sized or secondary city system. Based on a methodology that integrates the morphological (size, location and socioeconomic history) and the functional dimensions (centrality index, advanced producer services (APS) concentration and commuting), the article compares new employment centres—cities with metropolitan origin—and historical cities—previously free standing cities, progressively integrated in metropolitan processes. The results show a distinction between (1) metropolitan cities, with a traditional intermediation role, and (2) metropolitan intermediary cities, that include an additional quality to their traditional intermediation role, that of concentrating APS. The article confirms that some medium-sized cities—metropolitan intermediary cities—linked to different origins and up to 100?km away from the metropolis are more visible in the global scene and are establishing an emerging global multicore-network at a metropolitan-regional scale.     

Cultural diplomacy: beyond the national interest?

The field of cultural diplomacy, which looms large in present-day cultural policy and discourse, has been insufficiently analysed by the cultural disciplines. This special issue engages with the task of filling the gap. The present essay sets out the terms in which the authors have taken up this engagement, focusing principally on Australia and Asia. Distinguishing between cultural diplomacy that is essentially interest-driven governmental practice and cultural relations, which is ideals-driven and practiced largely by non-state actors, the authors pursue a twofold aim. First, to demystify the field, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; second, to better understand how actually-existing discourses of cultural diplomacy and/or cultural relations operate in different national contexts. The essay seeks in particular to scrutinize the current confusion surrounding cultural diplomacy and, in the context of the changing role of the nation-state, to explore its possibilities as an instrument for going beyond the national interest.