In search of frameworks for productive comparison of cities in world history

In 2013, The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, edited by Peter Clark, was published. Its 44 chapters (a total of 882 pages) aim to develop a framework for understanding urban history comparatively and over long spans of time. The authors of the four chronological chapters on Chinese cities attempt to achieve the following goals: to examine the diversity of Chinese cities over time, to analyze the characteristics of Chinese urban development in general, and to illuminate how changing Chinese cities and urban networks reflect and influence world trends. This essay discusses how the Oxford Handbook can serve as a guide and resource for meaningful urban comparisons and also highlights some of its limitations. It compares the Oxford Handbook to a similar volume, The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, published in 2014. The essay encourages scholars of Chinese cities to consider widening the scope of their comparisons and contribute to scholarship on the development of urban systems worldwide.     

A Textual Ethnography of Collaboration in Early Sámi Studies

This is an ethnographic study of collaboration for publishing textual representations of the Sámi based on ethnographic experience that reflect acquisition of agency and contingent intertextuality. The textual ethnography unravels early twentieth-century collaborative frameworks in which the investigated works were generated and their historical context. Consequently, my paper proposes to re-evaluate the role and impact of the ethnographic writing by Emilie Demant Hatt in addition to her collaboration with Johan Turi. This entails an exploration into personal histories and relationships, gendered ramifications, intellectual and political context, the creative process, the contingent editorial activities and their reception histories.     

Extra-regional linkages through MNCs in organizationally thick and specialized RISs: a source of new path development?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how global innovation networks (GIN) within multinational companies (MNCs) act as extra-regional sources for path development in a regional innovation system (RIS) specializing in the oil and gas sector. We combine the literature on intra-firm knowledge dynamics in MNCs’ GIN with the literature on RISs to better understand their interrelatedness and their dynamics. Based on interviews with 15 MNCs located in the south-west of Norway, we find that firms are highly dependent on competence throughout the MNCs’ entire networks, as well as interaction with the overall RIS. The findings expose that MNCs’ GINs can act as extra-regional sources for path ‘extension’ in thick and specialized RISs through intra-firm mobility, observation and sharing of routines and best practice, mainly resulting in incremental innovations. We find some signs of potential path ‘renewal’, including radical innovation ideas. However, there are hampering factors linked to strong internal competition for innovation projects, pressure for local profitability and ownership motivation. At the level of RISs, new initiatives going beyond existing cluster initiatives and specializations need support.     

Country Roads: Travel,Visibility, and Late Classic Settlement in the Southern Maya Mountains

Mayanist archaeology has long been concerned with creating and evaluating explanatory models for the locations of ancient sites relative to one another and to the physical geography of the Maya world. This study combines epigraphic data and spatial analyses to explore motivations for settlement location and to interrogate territorial strategies in Late Classic (a.d. 600–830) kingdoms in the southern Maya Mountains, around the modern towns of Dolores and Poptún, Guatemala. Least-cost path analyses were used to model natural travel corridors and their relationship with site location was assessed. In conjunction, viewshed analyses were applied to evaluate the importance of visual connections to likely travel routes. The results are considered in the context of the socio-politics and economics of the region, and raise questions about the character of and interconnections between travel, exchange, settlement location, and mechanisms for reinforcing territorial claims in the Late Classic Southern Maya Mountains.