Export of environmental technologies by publicly owned companies: approaches,drivers and obstacles among Swedish municipal companies

This article focuses on the export of environmental technology by publicly owned companies. The export of such technologies has the potential to contribute to economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability. However, research on this emerging topic has so far largely focused on privately owned SMEs compared to publicly owned companies. Using interviews with 12 Swedish municipally owned companies which develop such systems and a survey with 36 others, we analyse their approaches, drivers for and obstacles to export. These companies use a combination of different approaches such as subsidiaries, independent projects, licensing and private-public partnerships to engage in export. However, in contrast to private companies which are often driven by internal factors such as extra sales, these municipally owned companies are largely motivated by external factors such as customer requests and opportunities to contribute to environmental sustainability. Furthermore, their main export barriers relate to differences between the business culture and political systems in their home and target markets. Their export experiences are influenced by their municipal ownership, the types of technologies they develop and the institutional contexts within which they operate. This study reveals an actor type struggling to find a balance between domestic obligations and commercialization in international markets.     

From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955

This paper examines the early years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its conceptualization of ‘rural welfare’, an approach that foresaw the modernization of agricultural societies and the alleviation of poverty through improvements in labor, housing, health, education of people working in agriculture. Based on the correspondence of FAO officials and experts, the paper shows how in the late 1940s, the Rural Welfare Division, under the leadership of its Director Horace Belshaw, promoted a low-modernist and local-sensitive approach to rural development that emphasized the subjectivity of welfare and that was skeptical of top-down development programs. As the paper argues, Belshaw's holistic understanding of rural communities was abandoned in the early 1950s in favor of an increasingly technical development consultancy, characterized by short-term interventions rather than by an intellectual and scientific debate about the larger implications of development.     

论知识经济与未来图书馆员的素质和技能

知识经济正引导着图书馆进入一个极其美妙的知识信息的自由空间,提高图书馆馆员的素质和技能,建设一支跨世纪的图书馆管理人才队伍,是当前社会主义市场经济中图书馆事业改革和发展的需要,更是知识经济时代的必然要求。     

试论建国初期的技术革新运动

新中国成立初期,为了改变经济基础薄弱、技术落后的状况,实现社会主义工业化,在全国范围内开展了技术革新运动。在中国共产党的领导下,通过学习国外的先进技术与经验,大力加强技术教育和文化教育,确保了“一五”计划的顺利实施,为我国实现社会主义工业化奠定了初步基础,培养了大量技术人才,激发了人民群众的创造智慧和革新精神。     

Metal Ties in Genoa,Italy: Manufacture,Trade, and Use from the 15th to the 18th Century

The article deals with the use of metal ties in an ancient and stratified urban context, the city of Genoa, starting from the notarial documents preserved in its State Archives. The work has different objectives: to show the results that can be obtained, on an urban scale, thanks to a research path that compares indirect sources of different types with the observation of historical buildings; to highlight the “weight” and the role that the ties, often hidden, had in buildings, and not only the monumental ones; to increase knowledge of the production process of this constructive element. The wide and diversified use of metal ties found in Genoa seems to proceed in parallel, in the 15th century, with the development of a flourishing productive and mercantile business based on the commercial monopoly of the hematite of the island of Elba by the city oligarchy and, between the 16th and 17th centuries, with the huge investments in the construction sector highlighted by the abundant documentary sources.     

“Hungry for Knowledge”: Towards a Meso‐History of the Environmental Sciences

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20^th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20^th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20^th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.     

To Clench or to Rivet: That is the Question

Definitions of the terms 'clench' and 'rivet' proposed by A. E. Christensen are evaluated using the etymology of those terms and recent usage. An alternative definition of 'clench', is proposed, and definitions of 'hooked nail' and 'turned nail' are introduced. It is suggested that the term 'rivet' should be restricted to ferrous fastenings used with metal plates.
© 2004 The Nautical Archaeology Society