Border blocking effects in collaborative firm innovation

Border regions are not often associated with innovation and economic prosperity. And even when they are prosperous, cross-border interaction is still mostly limited. The opening up of borders in Europe has presented new opportunities for firms located in these border regions to co-operate for innovation and knowledge to flow across borders. Despite the reduction of the importance of borders, firms seeking to access cross-border knowledge resources need still to ‘cross’ the border and address the various effects it brings. This paper therefore asks the question of how the presence of a border affects the processes by which firms attempt to build up productive co-operations for innovation. We use a heuristic of collaborative innovation across borders as building up through four sequential cooperation stages, and each of these different stages is susceptible to different kinds of border effects. Using a case study of firms co-operating across the Dutch-Flemish border, we empirically explore these border crossing processes in order to shed further light on how border processes play out.     

Living on the Edge? Transformation of a Marginal Pleistocene Landscape Into a Settlement Area in the Northeastern Part of the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This paper will examine settlement location during the Iron Age in the northeast part of the Netherlands, an area shaped by Pleistocene geology. In recent years, a number of Late Iron Age/Early Roman settlements situated on the low lying slopes of sand ridges and nearby stream ridges revealed traces of an earlier Iron Age occupation. Palynological data revealed that this part of the landscape was used by humans before it was transformed into an area of settlement. An analysis of excavation data from two key sites at Denekamp-De Borchert and Groningen-Helpermaar, as well as other known sites, lead to the conclusion that the transformation of ‘peripheral landscapes’ into permanent settlement locations was preceded by a phase of arable cultivation which left no trace of permanent habitation. It is also suggested that the impact of human behaviour on the natural landscape in the Early and Middle Iron Age was much bigger than previously anticipated. When excavating this type of settlement areas dating to the Late Iron Age, archaeologists must be aware that only of a small group of archaeological features exist. The proposed model for the choice of settlement location may be more widespread, because of similarities in landscape between the study area presented here and other landscapes in Northwest-Europe (e.g. parts of Germany and Denmark).     

Reports of the Cook voyages in the Hamburgischer Correspondent

The beginnings of a racialised order in Oceania, and of German involvement in such, reach back a long way. In this article, the author traces elements of this racialisation back to the years before the first formal European settlement on the Australian continent. She examines important aspects of the German journalistic reception of James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific by focusing on one particularly highly networked and very widely distributed newspaper and its reporting in the period 1768–1787. She uses this to show how the editors, and especially London-based German-speaking correspondents, consciously leveraged an Anglophilia that was typical of the Hanseatic city of Hamburg in a way that encouraged their German-speaking readers, wherever they might be, to closely identify with British exploration and even claim ownership of these events themselves. Anglophilia and the German-language reporting of the Cook voyages, therefore, supplied raw materials for an entangled sense of imperial identity.     

MacLiammóir's minstrel and Johnston's morality: cultural memories of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Gate Theatre

This article explores how Micheál MacLiammóir and Denis Johnston attempted to perform cultural memories of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Gate Theatre and thereby articulated their respective views on a colonial past that had to be reassessed anew, on the one hand, and a postcolonial future that still had to be made possible, on the other. By analysing how these two prominent Gate Theatre playwrights sought to commemorate the Rising through mediated performances, this article argues that the Gate Theatre did not simply serve as a playground for disinterested aestheticists but also created a stylised forum where the perceived strain between Ireland's traumatic history and its uncertain future could be addressed and reconfigured into a meaningful teleology. In doing so, this article attempts to demonstrate that the Gate Theatre served as a cultural counterweight to the Abbey's ostensible hegemony as a theatrical force in Irish identity formation.     

Early Navajo land use in northwestern New Mexico: Big Bead Mesa in regional perspective

Big Bead Mesa (LA 12351) is the most famous Navajo archaeological site ever investigated and has played an important role in the interpretation of Navajo culture history. It remains a sacred place to the Navajo, both for historical and spiritual reasons. Pioneering work by Dorothy L. Keur resulted in the publication of the first Society for American Archaeology Memoir and brought Navajo archaeology national recognition. James Hester used Big Bead Mesa as the type site for his Cabezon Phase, although he conducted no research at the site. Big Bead Mesa is not the only Early Navajo site in the Rio Puerco Valley; however, the surrounding area has never been adequately investigated or reported. This paper documents a variety of Navajo sites in the Rio Puerco Valley and indicates that Big Bead Mesa was only a small part of a much larger Navajo occupation that extended to the north, west, and south.     

The Future of Utopia

The widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions.     

Learning to teach geography for primary education: results of an experimental programme

Students training to become primary school teachers appear to have little awareness of the core concepts of geography (teaching). To ensure that future primary school teachers are able to develop their pupils’ geographical awareness, a six weeks programme was developed. The characteristics of this programme – named Consciously Teaching Geography (CTG) – are: principles of good geography teaching, conjunction and a recurrent structure during training, modelling and reflection. In a quasi-experimental research design the question is answered what the effects are of CTG on the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for the subject of geography of first year primary student teachers. The results indicated that the programme has a positive effect on the domain-specific PCK development in the short term.     

Begging Letters: Tin Trunk Literacy and the Empathy Economy of Tristan da Cunha,c. 1909–39

European colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic shipping at the turn of the twentieth century the male exchange economy vanished and female literacy acquired a vital new importance in the creation and maintenance of an empathy economy with the Atlantic mainlands generating the manufactured imports essential to the colony’s survival. The low literacy level and new dependence for subsistence on writing undermined the patriarchal authority of ‘headmen’ and gave a small group of female amanuenses effective political power on the island. The latter worked hard to maintain their newfound power by thwarting repeated metropolitan attempts to spread literacy or socialise the island economy and fostering fear and ignorance of the outside world among the islanders. The profoundly conservative and even oppressive nature of ‘functional literacy’ on Tristan da Cunha in the first half of the twentieth century provides a corrective to the emancipatory claims made for ‘tin trunk literacy’ elsewhere in the global south.     

Maritime Culture in the Netherlands: accessing the late medieval maritime cultural landscapes of the north‐eastern Zuiderzee

This paper examines the theory and practice of the maritime cultural landscape in general, and projects the theoretical concepts and aspects involved on the highly dynamic late medieval north‐eastern Zuiderzee region in the Netherlands. The cultivation of land and marine erosion (floods and rising sea level) are considered as the main factors that caused the transformation of the physical landscape of this region from peatlands with freshwater basins into a tidal lagoon. As a consequence, multiple settlements drowned, large areas of land submerged, and culture and the landscape gradually became more maritime, giving the research area a cultural identity and dimension.