Estonian family farms in transition: a study of intangible assets and gender issues in generational succession

This paper, based on interviews, highlights intangible assets in the intergenerational transfer of farms in two Estonian municipalities from a long-term and gender perspective. The study stretches from the interwar period in the twentieth century up to the present. It has been shown that emotional bonds to the land are generally strong in Estonia. This paper aims to highlight how such bonds and feelings may influence decisions on generational succession. The results of the study indicate that family farming and land transfer have had a significant and persistent role in Estonian society, even during the Soviet period under its collectivised system of agriculture. Transfers of intangible assets were important during Soviet rule, for example, the transfer of knowledge about the pre-Soviet property and the value and importance of the farmhouse. Today, family farming is gradually declining in importance, but older traditions of farm and farmhouse transfer can still be found, such as early decisions on who is to be the successor. This is evident among active farmers but also among former farmers with strong emotional bonds to the land. Traditional gender roles tend towards men’s knowledge still generally being more highly valued in the decision about who is to be the successor to the family land.     

《活法》的经营之道

稻盛和夫的著述非常多,其中,比较有代表性的是《活法》。该书早已翻译成中文,分两卷在东方出版社出版。该书篇幅简短、案例生动、说理透彻,深受中国读者的喜爱,主要内容包括三个方面：企业需要哲学;人生与经营都重在态度;具体的经营方法。作者结合《活法》一书,阐述了对稻盛和夫经营哲学的最新认识。     

Family and familiars. The concentric household in late medieval penitentiary petitions

Few studies to date have examined the relational aspects of life within a non-nuclear medieval household. This article aims to show that the affective bonds that were prescribed for members of the nuclear family in the late middle ages were also prescribed for members of the larger household, though to a lesser degree. ‘Familiars’ were expected to develop bonds of loyalty that cut across distinctions of social estate. A series of petitions to the papal penitentiary from German-speaking areas during the fifteenth century shows that both elite and non-elite individuals exhibited such affective bonds of support in violent situations as well as in a wide variety of other circumstances. This indicates that the household formed a major building block of medieval society in relational as well as in logistical terms.     

贵州麻江高枧夏家史考

“树由根而发,水由源而流”,当紫禁城里传出贵州麻哈州人夏同袜高中状元之时,祝贺之余要思考的便是原因,固然夏状元本人是成就这一巅峰时刻的本因,然他身后的那个家族对他的影响亦不容忽视。历史沧桑变幻,关于夏状元以及他的那个家族已经变得愈加模糊,便是他的后世子孙对他亦是不甚清楚。纵有热心人士努力,但不成系统,本文试图为夏家600余年的历史理出一个脉络,希望抛砖引玉,以此为起点展开对夏状元及其家族的研究,作为600百年前来到贵州的汉族,这个家族的成长发展具有一定的典型意义,具有较高的研究价值。     

银行学会考论(1932～1950)

银行学会于1932年12月9日由上海银行业人士发起成立,1950年3月3日改组归并至上海金融业同业公会筹备委员会。作为旧中国唯一的全国性银行学术团体,银行学会在存续的近二十年时间里,对推进银行学术和实务研究、培养银行业专门人才,起到了重要作用。     

家族内人口与生活:以浦江义门郑氏为例

《(浦江)义门郑氏宗谱》拥有一个家族中以男性人口为主的详细资料,具有重要的研究价值,对于了解该家族的人口数量、人口增减的速度、职业、化状况、婚姻状况、寿命等等,都具有重要的研究价值。藉此数据为蓝本,加以比排分析,为后人了解一个家族的婚姻状况、平均寿命、化、职业等都可以展开新的视野。     

Family assemblages

Abstract

In this paper, we develop and extend the emerging concept of ‘family assemblages’ to theorise the bodies, objects, habits, spaces, technologies, discourses and affects that participate in family life. We argue that existing conceptualisations of the family tend towards anthropocentrism, a sundering of the world into active human subjects and passive non-human objects. Assemblage theory offers a means of overcoming this anthropocentrism in order to generate richer accounts of the more-than-human dynamics of family life. From this perspective, anything that participates in the action of family life can be considered a member of the family assemblage, establishing the ontological ground for a non-anthropocentric and relational view of the family. We elaborate these arguments with reference to ethnographic research on fathers’ mental health conducted in Melbourne, Australia. Our ethnographic material provides a rich empirical context for the development of the notion of family assemblages. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of the family assemblage is not simply a provocation to the human-centric assumptions that guide most studies of family life, but may also prove useful for human and health geographers already attuned to the materiality of family life.     

‘Various Means of Providing for Their Own Tables’: Comparing Slave Family Economies in the Antebellum South

Recent scholarship has changed our understanding of African‐American slaves’ experiences by shifting our focus from the external factors of slavery (what slavery did to men and women in bondage) to slave agency (slaves’ determination in creating their own autonomous culture). While this has been a positive development, there is a danger in forgetting the framework within which slave culture was created. This article seeks a middle ground by examining the ways in which certain external factors of slavery determined the extent to which slave families could develop internal economies and engage in independent production. Comparing slave families’ experiences in three distinct cash crop regions of the antebellum South, this study’s findings indicate that the varied nature of work patterns and crop‐specific labor incentives in different regions served to either encourage or thwart the development of slave family economies.     

Making room for rubbers: Gender,technology, and birth control before the pill

Before the Food and Drug Administration approved in 1960 the distribution of oral contraceptives, the most popular form of birth control in the United States was the condom. Scholars have often downplayed men's involvement in the history of birth control, relegating knowledge and use of contraceptive technology to a separate "female domain." This article explores the role of condoms in the evolution of the American birth control business, attitudes toward public health, and everyday sexual behavior, and suggests why the full complexities of the history of birth control are best captured by an approach that is attentive to broad gender dynamics as well as to the diversity of technological change.     

Manufacturing mainframes: component fabrication and component procurement at IBM and Sperry Univac, 1960–1975

In the golden age of mainframes (1960–1975) one of the foremost issues facing mainframe computer firms was manufacturing – despite this fact, system design has received nearly all the attention of scholars to date. The greatest manufacturing concern of these mainframe producers was component technology: the selection and provision of memory, especially main memory. As this period progressed, semiconductor memory was coming to dominance. Increasingly, firms' performance in the expanding market for mainframes pivoted on their memory component decisions. International Business Machines (IBM) had become the dominant mainframe producer, and its particular response to the semiconductor memory challenge has taken the role as the default or natural position. A comparison of IBM's experience with that of their fiercest mainframe rival during this period, Sperry Univac, highlights the centrality of memory components to the overall mainframe business as well as the highly contingent and path‐dependent nature of the particular semiconductor policies and practices adopted by firms.