Paving the way for new regional industrial paths: actors and modes of change in Scania’s games industry

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarly work has enhanced our understanding of how new path development activities are enabled or constrained by ‘regional environments’, made up of pre-existing industrial structures, knowledge organizations, support structures and institutional configurations. This paper moves beyond overly static views on regional environments. We develop a dynamic perspective by analysing conceptually and empirically how a constraining environment can be transformed into one that enables the development of new growth paths. The paper offers a typology of various modes of change, including layering, adaptation and novel application that are used by key actors to ‘manipulate’ the regional support structures to facilitate new regional industrial path development. The conceptual framework is applied to a case study of the digital games industry in the region of Scania, southern Sweden. Our findings suggest that the creation of a more enabling environment for the growth of the digital games industry has been the outcome of multi-scalar processes and combinations of various modes of change employed by a few key individuals operating in the newly emerging path.     

Busman’s stomach and the embodiment of modernity

This paper examines the relationship between the gastric illness, ‘busman’s stomach’ and the Coronation bus strike of May 1937 in which 27,000 London busworkers walked out for better working conditions and a seven-and-half-hour day. It explores the way in which new patterns of somatisation, gastroenterological techniques, psychological theories and competing understandings of time worked together to create new political institutions and new forms of political action in inter-war Britain.     

Globalization of the animation industry: multi-scalar linkages of six animation production centers

This paper examines the change in animation production over time and analyzes the different scales of internal and external linkages among six animation production centers. Four types of producers were identified based on their roles in the animation industry and their multi-scalar linkages were investigated for similarities and differences. Several factors including production costs, local skills, government policy and domestic markets were found to affect the growth of new production centers. High value-capture occurs mostly in production centers where tacit knowledge is created. The governance of each animation production center was found to have evolved based on its unique development path within the industry’s global value chain.     

Nami's Middle Bronze Age Suburb: The Coastal Settlement at Site 104–106

This study presents a late 19th to early 18th cent. BCE, MBIIA settlement in the immediate vicinity of Tel Nami on the Carmel Coast of Israel. Site 104–106 has been all but destroyed by modern agricultural activity as well as quarrying, but a large number of ceramics and small finds were salvaged during a 1985–6 survey of Tel Nami?'s hinterland as well as subsequent geoarchaeological research of the area. Little of the site remains, and the current study functionally amounts to a salvage project for an MBIIA coastal site, which was mentioned in an earlier survey. Geomorphology reveals how the sandstone kurkar ridges in this area of the coast governed the dynamic relationship between Tel Nami and its hinterland. Comparable ceramic chronology for Site 104–106 presented derives from Aphek-Antipatris, Megiddo, Kabri, Tel Ifshar, Tel Nami itself, and other MBIIA coastal sites of the Southern Levant. The ceramics include well-produced local wares as well as imports from coastal Lebanon, Syria, and Cyprus confirmed by petrographic analyses. Finds suggest a small agro-industrial site in the immediate periphery of the coastal Tel Nami.     

Liverpool’s Cotton Importers c. 1700 to 1914

Liverpool’s first cotton importers dealt in a range of commodities and this pattern continued until the late eighteenth century. As the British cotton industry grew and new sources of raw cotton – particularly the United States – emerged, some merchants specialized increasingly in cotton in the early decades of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the largest importers of cotton dealt in little besides cotton. The growing prosperity of Liverpool’s cotton trade drew companies from elsewhere in the United Kingdom to Liverpool to participate in this trade. By the mid nineteenth century, several key cotton importing houses had originated in the United States; by the end of the nineteenth century the largest importers there. The manner of importing cotton changed. At first, importers had to send a ship out with a captain or supercargo with broad instructions about what to freight the ship with. As communications improved, importers were able to control their purchases of cotton more closely. In the nineteenth century, a significant amount of cotton was imported through Liverpool by merchants acting on a commission basis but this form of importing declined in the later decades of the century.     

Exploring trade globalization in the long run: The RICardo project

Initiated in 2004, the RICardo project focuses on bilateral trade data of all the world's countries from the early nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. The project includes the construction of a database and the creation of a website. It is a pioneering work in the field of historical trade statistics that aims at providing easy-to-access research material to the scientific community and at attracting a wider public to the history of trade relationships. The article emphasizes the originality of the project and sums up its various aspects by reviewing previous trade databases, clarifying the main features of historical trade statistics, and describing the construction and use of the RICardo website.     

A trade balance: litigation and negotiation in the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the interface between international and domestic policy processes. By locating trading disputes in a political analysis of policy implementation, it is argued that it is difficult to establish conceptually how the WTO dispute settlement system could have authority separate from and above the conventional international politics of trade policy relations. Instead, the article argues that case outcomes should be expected to be largely the product of domestic political institutions and policy processes, and how these intersect with developments in the WTO dispute settlement system. Brief studies of the Australian government's dispute settlement strategy and two high-profile WTO disputes—the US upland cotton and European Union sugar cases—serve to suggest that the authority of international trade law is not as significant as assumed by the legalisation thesis. Rather, domestic politics and institutions have an important impact on the outcome of trade disputes.     

The Zoutsteeg Three: Three New Cases of African Types of Dental Modification from Saint Martin,Dutch Caribbean

Dental modification was widely practiced in sub‐Saharan Africa as a form of cultural expression, and during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, it was regularly identified in enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas. Here, we report three new cases of African types of dental modification from the Caribbean island of Saint Martin that were recently encountered during construction activities in the Zoutsteeg area of Philipsburg, the capital of the Dutch half of the island. The artifacts associated with the burials indicate that they date to the late 17^th century, prior to the foundation of the town of Philipsburg in 1735. The dental evidence further suggests that the three individuals were born in Africa, as opposed to the Americas. This could be confirmed by tooth enamel strontium isotope measurements which yielded values that are inconsistent with an origin in the Caribbean but consistent with an origin in Africa. Unfortunately, neither the dental patterns nor the strontium isotope values allow us to determine their specific origins in Africa. However, both the methods used to modify the teeth and the isotope ratios suggest that the ‘Zoutsteeg Three’ originated in different parts of Africa. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

皖南上海小三线职工的民生问题研究

上海小三线分布于皖南和浙西数百公里的山区,从1965年兴建到1988年移交结束,前后历时24年,人数最多时达到7.2万余人。小三线作为上海的后方基地和经济"飞地",自成一个社会体系。如何保障数万人的日常生活,解决他们面临的婚姻、户口、医疗、教育等问题,是小三线建设中的核心问题,也关涉到沪皖两地政府和职能部门的各项政策与协调。民生问题是研究小三线建设这一国家战略政策时不可忽略的重要方面。     

The Urban “Cultural Nexus of Power”： Intellectual Elites in Shanghai and Beijing, 1900-1937

In the decades before the full-scale war with Japan in 1937, a robust series of institutions connected the bourgeois with intellectuals （which included professionals and journalists, as well as academics） in Shanghai. Collectively, these institutions can be understood as forming an urban ＂cultural nexus of power＂ that allowed non-state actors to effectively control aspects of Shanghai＇s political life. This bourgeois-intellectual alliance was not inevitable; no similar bonds existed between these same two groups in Beijing. It was forged in Shanghai due to the city＇s unique historical position as a Treaty Port and its dynamic economy, which included an extensive structure of private higher education and a market-based publishing industry. Unlike the rural ＂cultural nexus of power＂ originally described by Prasenjit Duara, this urban nexus grew stronger during the political and economic changes of the early twentieth century. War and revolution in the 1930s and 1940s, however, destroyed the connections between the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, ending the vibrant urban environment they had created.