How to Attract Managers and Professionals to Peripheral Regions? Recruitment Strategies in the Weser-Ems Region,Germany

An adequate supply of highly qualified workers is a central prerequisite for the ability of peripheral and economically lagging regions to develop. In order to take advantage of endogenous potential, bottlenecks in human knowledge and know-how must be overcome by means of support from outside. An important element in this is migration. Taking as an example the Weser-Ems region in northwestern Germany, the strategies used by local enterprises to motivate managerial staff to move from other regions are shown and the level of success achieved is described. As is shown, the regional labour market has lost significance for the upper segment in the course of structural changes in the economy, which has led to an increase in the necessity for cross-regional searches in order to fill managerial posts. As enterprises in peripheral locations have poor starting conditions in the cross-regional competition for highly qualified workers, this development demands that more and more enterprises mobilize considerable resources for the recruitment of staff. Although the findings indicate that the potential of workers willing to migrate is greater and more diverse than is often assumed, they also show that certain types of enterprises have great difficulty in overcoming independently the personnel-related disadvantages resulting from the location, and require support through regional structural policy.     

Friendship and love in the lives of two twelfth-century English saints

For twelfth-century religious the vow of chastity did not mean renouncing a rich affective life. Along with the love of God, Aelred of Rievaulx and Christina of Markyate both found room in their lives for profound emotional relationships with several individuals. These relationships were not carnal but to call them ‘friendship’ underestimates their strength and passion. The modern distinction between passionate sexual love and passionless asexual friendship is inappropriate here. ‘Spiritual love’ best describes these relationships: deep and exclusive without being carnal, involving the passions of the soul rather than those of the body. Vitae survive for both Christina and Aelred, and Aelred also wrote several treatises on the subject of love and friendship. The biographers and Aelred himself followed in a medieval tradition of using the language of erotic love to describe spiritual relationships. These spiritual love relationships did not fit the monastic ideal of love (caritas) towards all; they were particular and exclusive (in each person's life, the several relationships were sequetial, not simultaneous). But they do indicate that twelfth-century monasticism provided a channel for the emotions we today connect with erotic love, without the rupture of vows of chastity or virginity.     

Book reviews

New Book Review policy

Australia

IDEALS AND FOREIGN POLICY

Henry S. Albinski

J. A. Camilleri, An Introduction to Australian Foreign Policy, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1973, pp. v + 137, $1.50; J. Camilleri and M. Teichmann, Security and Survival. The New Era in International Relations, Heinemann Educational Australia. Melbourne, 1973, pp. ix + 226, $3.75.

Peter Aimer, Politics, Power and Persuasion: the Liberals in Victoria, James Bennett, Melbourne. 1974. pp. lv + 243, $9.95.

Alan Richardson, British Immigrants and Australia: A Psycho‐social Inquiry, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974, pp. 198, $8.95.

Bruce Juddery, At the Centre: The Australian Bureaucracy in the 1970s, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 272. Illustrated by Pickering. $4.95.

F. A. Larcombe, The Origin of Local Government in New South Wales 1831–58, Sydney University Press, in association with the Local Government Association of New South Wales and the Shires Association of New South Wales, 1973, pp. xv + 323, maps, $12.00.

H. G. Oxley, Mateship in Local Organization, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1974, pp. 240, $8.00.

H. Raysmith, J. Rimmer and D. Wookey, The Gee‐long Experiment in Social Planning, Geelong and District Community Chest Association, 1973, pp. 110, no price given.

C. A. Hughes and B. D. Graham, Voting for the Australian House of Representatives 1901–1964, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974, pp. xiv + 544 + xiii, $8.95.

International

URBAN POLITICS Martin Painter

Eugene Lewis, The Urban Political System, Dryden, Hinsdale, Illinois, 1973, $5.00.

Murray S. Stedman, Urban Politics, Winthrop, Cambridge, Mass., 1972, $7.50.

Kevin R. Cox, Conflict, Power and Politics in the City, McGraw‐Hill, N.Y., 1973, $4.50.

I. H. Burnley, ed., Urbanization in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974, $13.50.

Rex Mortimer, ed., Showcase State: The Illusion of Indonesia's “Accelerated Modernisation”, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1973, pp. xiii + 163, $3.25, $5.95.

CHINA, RUSSIA, INDIA

S. P. Seth

Edward E. Rice, Mao's Way, University of California Press (Centre for Chinese Studies), Berkeley, 1972, pp. 596 + ix, $14.00.

Richard H. Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture, University of California Press (Centre for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan), 1972 (paperback), pp. 604 + xix, $US5.95.

Geoffrey Jukes, The Soviet Union in Asia, Angus and Robertson (in association with The Australian Institute of International Affairs), Sydney, 1973, pp. 304 + vii, $7.50.

Alastair Lamb, The Sino‐Indian Border in Ladakh, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1973, pp. 113 + xi, $6.00.

T. E. Smith, ed., The Politics of Family Planning in the Third World, Allen and Unwin, London, 1973, pp. 352, $14.00.

Ronald J. May, ed., Priorities in Melanesian Development: Papers Delivered at the Sixth Waigani Seminar, University of Papua and New Guinea, Port Moresby, and Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, ANU Press, Canberra, 1973, pp. xii + 470, $6.00.

J. Ayodele Langley, Pan‐Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa 1900–1945, Oxford University Press, London, 1973, pp. viii + 421, $12.00.

Robert C. Good, U.D.I.: The International Politics of the Rhodesian Rebellion, Faber & Faber, London, 1973, pp. 368, $14.00.

Jack. Hayward, The One and Indivisible French Republic, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1973, pp. 306, $16.00 and $6.10.

Jean‐Jacques Salomon, Science and Politics, N. Lindsay, trans., MIT Press, Cambridge, 1973, pp. xxii + 277, $US 15.00.

M. Moroshima, Marx's Economics, Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp. viii + 198, £3.60.     

Refusing Reform,Reworking Pity,or Reinforcing Privilege? The Multivalent Politics of Young People’s Fun and Friendship within a Volunteering Encounter

This paper analyses initiatives which took British young people from ethnic minority and disenfranchised backgrounds to volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa. It asks whether decolonial possibilities can be seen in the politics of youthful fun and friendship amid a practice undeniably driven by interpenetrating neocolonial logics, where enrolment in helping “needy” others is seen as a means to “improve” working-class and racially marked youth. The paper argues that volunteers’ investments in leisure constituted a politics of refusal towards how they were acted upon as objects of concern. More ambivalently, playful, friendly interactions between British and African youth disrupted relations of charitable pity and signalled desires for solidarity and equality, but cannot be claimed as fully decolonial. At times, fun also re-entrenched neocolonial and other oppressive relations. Overall, the paper demonstrates that a close reading of the multivalent, affective politics of young people’s fun and friendship can reveal much about the reproduction or subversion of contemporary neocolonial logics that operate both within and beyond the borders of postcolonial Britain.