Book reviews

Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ^CAbbas the Great. Trans. Roger M. Savory. Persian Heritage Series 28, Boulder: West‐view, 1978, 2 vol., xxxix, 1326, index, glossary.

From June to October: The Middle East between 1967 and 1973. Edited by Itamar Rabinovich and Haim Shaked. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1978. 419 pp.

A Persian Sufi Poem: Vocabulary and Terminology. By Bo Utas. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series No. 36. London and Malmo: Curzon Press, 1977. 294 + 54 pp.

A Survey of Persian Handicraft: A Pictorial Introduction to the Contemporary Folk Arts and Art Crafts of Modern Iran. Edited by. Jay Gluck and Sumi Hiramoto Gluck; Teheran, New York, London, Ashiya (Japan); Survey of Persian Art; 1535/ 1977. 416 pp.

Die Afshar: Nomadismus in Raum Kerman/Zentraliran. By Georg Stöber. Marburg/Lahn: Marburger Geographische Schriften, Heft 76, 1978. 322 pp. DM 39.00.     

Regulating Local Tax Abatement Policies

This article addresses several questions about property tax. abatements in the United States, all directed at why tax abatements should be regulated more closely, and one question about how this might be accomplished. First, are tax abatements “job increment financing” since they are exchanged for future jobs? Public decisionmakers assume that jobs mean tax revenues, but problems emerge when abatements are granted without knowledge of expected jobs, or if local government administrators and planners have no means of holding businesses accountable if their promises are not kept. Second, are local decisionmakers behaving imprudently when they abate multiyear taxes? Using abatements may not always be a particularly prudent way of using public resources. Third, can tax abatements undermine local democracy? Abatements weaken public involvement in city government when citizens have few opportunities to debate decisionmakers about tax exemptions, but they should have such a chance because abatements have costly, longlasting effects on current and future citizens. Fourth, do abatements create social costs? Tax abatements generate external effects for those who are not party to the politics of tax exemptions, but there are no easy answers about how to correct the externalities. Finally, what are the options for stopping tax abatements? These include federal prohibition, cooperative agreements, federal fiscal incentives, the courts, tougher negotiating tactics, and more stringent contractual provisions by urban planners and administrators.     

Widespread Policy Disruption and Interest Mobilization

We consider the involvement of different interests in policymaking following disruptions that affect the agendas of multiple subsystems. The policy process literature suggests that increased policy uncertainty and jurisdictional ambiguity could lead to substantial upheavals in interest involvement. We address these possibilities in studying the mobilization of different interests after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, for eight disrupted policy subsystems. Contrary to expectations derived from the literature, we find limited evidence of interest upheaval or cross-subsystem spillovers in interest involvement. We suggest this is because policymakers sought to reduce policy uncertainty by calling upon those interests that were best equipped to help craft and implement policy solutions. These findings point to the stabilizing influence of policy subsystems in buffering against the effects of widespread disruptions.     

The Construction of the Khufu I Vessel (c.2566 BC): a Re-Evaluation

A re-evaluation of the published reports on the Khufu I vessel suggests: first, Egyptian boatwrights used as much of a plank's original width and length as possible to minimize waste, resulting in unpredictable stealer and scarf placement; second, crafting tenons to be narrower than corresponding mortises may have been one of many standardized techniques of Egyptian boatbuilding; third, temporary and permanent edge-to-edge transverse lashing was an important structural feature. Finally, woven straps instead of ropes were probably used to lash this vessel, and seams were probably sealed with wadding and battens, while the frames appear to have been recycled.
© 2009 The Author     

Modeling the Impact of Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce on the Organization of the Logistics Industry

In this article, we analyze patterns and recent trends of the logistics industry with specific emphasis on the impact of business-to-business (B-to-B) electronic commerce on its industrial organization. From this conceptualization, we develop an optimization-based logistics model comprising two interlinked networks representing commodity flow and information flow, respectively. The model is operationalized using Monte Carlo simulation to highlight possible scenarios of logistics industry changes in response to the use of B-to-B e-commerce. Through this endeavor, we examine how new technologies affect the cost of information and transportation transactions in the logistics industry.     

The Indexification of Poverty: The Covert Politics of Small-Area Indices

In recent decades statistical indices have become a dominant method for measuring many features of the social world. While the resulting enumerations are regularly cited by critical human geographers, the wider political stakes of indexing the world remain unaddressed. In this article, we theorise indexification as the process through which composite statistics transform theoretical constructs into epistemic objects, and then geographically bounded rankings. Rather than a neutral process, we argue that these epistemological manoeuvres can mask various forms of violence. Through a detailed analysis of the UK's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), we highlight the clandestine politics of indexification and their tendency to conceal harms meted out by the state. Seeking a more critical reckoning with indices, we conclude by calling for and outlining a project of radical indexification—a participatory, democratic, and transparent endeavour that takes spatial justice as its organising principle.     

Standardizing the state while integrating the frontier: the Chilean telegraph system in the Araucanía, 1870–1900

Beginning in 1870, the Chilean government built a telegraph network to support its conquest of the Mapuche people of the Araucanía, a region on its southern frontier. The telegraph not only facilitated military domination of the Mapuche, but also served to bring, first, army commanders and, later, civilian regional governors under more direct control from the capital. As this new technology was introduced, army commanders and telegraph officials each fought to control the frontier telegraph lines. This conflict, and a rapid but partial victory by the civilian telegraph specialists, demonstrates the role of the telegraph in making state services run by expert civilian professionals into an important part of and defining characteristic of the Chilean state by 1900.