Domestic timber auctions and flexibly specialized forestry in Japan

In Japan, a well-established, widespread system of local timber market auctions, featuring the exchange of privately owned logs, is increasingly threatened by imports organized according to mass production principles. This article assesses the evolution, rationale, and functions of Japan's timber auctions that were primarily created in post-war Japan to provide key roles linking small-scale (private) forest owners to flexibly specialized value chains that are consummated in Japanese homes. The conceptual point of departure for the analysis is flexible specialization theory's interpretation of industrialization as a contest between mass production and small-scale production. We extend this discussion by giving analytical priority to markets as an institution distinct from firms and by interpreting markets from the perspectives of transaction costs and embeddedness, concepts normally deemed antagonistic to one another. Empirically, four case studies of timber auctions located in central and southern Japan are analyzed based on personal interviews with auction managers and participants within the context of broader trends in forestry. Three auctions feature 'silent' bidding and one involves open bidding. While the auctions exhibit varying characteristics, they continue to be the fulcrum of localized forestry systems, even as they are threatened by declining prices driven by imported wood and by restructurings within the Japanese solid wood sector. The continued resiliency of the flexible specialization model, and the auctions that are at its core, has important implications for forestry throughout Japan.     

Editorial Introduction

Meillassoux, Claude. Alide Dasnois, translator. The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 421 pp. including notes, references, glossary, and index. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

McGlynn, Frank and Seymour Drescher, eds. The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture After Slavery. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. viii + 333 pp. including selected bibliography and index. $44.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.     

Introduction: Biographies of Anthropologists as Anthropological Data

Biographies of anthropologists are widely recognized as useful for the history of science and the discipline. Introducing this special issue “Biographies of Anthropologists,” I argue that they not only provide information about anthropology, but also data for anthropology because they are studies of human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, comparable to life histories of ethnographic informants. Biographies of anthropologists are of similar importance for empirical and theoretical anthropology as ethnographies, grammars, and monographs in archaeology and biological anthropology. They depict cultural dynamics from a person-centered, intimate, experience-near, and diachronic perspective on anthropology's cluster of sodalities.     

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS and GEOGRAPHERS IN THE 1990s

This paper explores the potential for interaction between the development of geographic information systems (GIS) and the development of geographical methodology in the next decade. Several interrelated themes occur throughout the paper: first, trends in the nature and extent of GIS development; second, opportunities for geographic investigation inherent in those developments; and third, contributions that geographers can make to the design of GIS It is suggested that GIS offer a wealth of geo-referenced data for potential use in modeling, as well as the capabilities to handle such data in geographical models. Geographers, in turn, can contribute to GIS design in ways that will enhance their capabilities and also facilitate geographical investigations. The incorporation of the quantitative geographical methods of the 1950s and 1960s with the GIS capabilities of the 1990s is foreseen This article's fourth theme is the concern over the critical shortage of trained persons competent in GIS technology and possessing a knowledge of spatial analytic methods. This may in itself be the limiting factor to the rational development of the field in the next decade. Suggestions are made for the types of training needed to remedy the problem. The fifth theme is the view of GIS from a global perspective, including the role of Canadian geographers in analysing global problems similar to those they face in Canada It is suggested that a convergence of the technologies for the gathering, storage, analysis, and display of georeferenced data occurring at local, regional, national multinational, and global scales has a potential in the next decade for an enriched geographical methodology Dans cet article, on explore les possibilités dinteractions entrp l'élaboration des systèmes d'information géographique et celle des méthodes géographiques au cours de la prochaine décennie. Plusieurs thèmes étroitement liés reviennent dans l'article. D'abord, on peut distinguer certaines orientations dans la nature et la portée de l'évolution des systèmes d'information géographique. Ensuite, il en ressort que quelques unes d'entre-elles pourraient faire l'objet d'enquêtes géographiques. Troisièmement, plusieurs contributions pourraient être apportées par les géographes à la conception des systèmes d'information géographique. Les systèmes d'information géographique sont une importante source de données à référence géographique pouvant être adaptés à la modélisation, et ils comportent de fortes capacités de manipulation de ces donnés dans des rnodèles géographiques. Les géographes, à leur tour, peuvent contribuer à la conception de ces systèmes de façon à augmenter leurs habilités, et en même temps, faciliter les enquêtes géographiques. On prévoit l'incorporation des méthodes géographiques quantitatives des années cinquante et soixante aux capacités des systèmes d'information géographique des années quatre-vingt-dix. Le quatrième motif tient à l'inquiétude que suscite la pénurie critique de personnel compétent dans la technologie des systèmes d'information géographique ainsi que dans les méthodes d'analyse spatiale. Cette pénurie pourrait imposer des limites au développement rationnel de ce domaine au cours de la prochaine décenpie. On propose des types de formation pour remédier à ce problème. Le cinquième motif porte sur la perspective des systèmes d'information géographique du point de vue mondial, et du rôle des géographes canadiens dans ce dornaine en évolution, qui connaît des problèmes semblables à ceux qu'on rencontre au Canada. On suggère une convergence technologique dans la collecte, l'entreposage, l'analysk et l'étalage des données a référence géographique aux niveaux local, régional, national, pluri-national et mondial offrant des possibilités d'enrichissement des méthodes géographiques au cours de la prochaine décennie.