Political Commitment,Policy Ambiguity,and Corporate Environmental Practices

A lack of clear political commitment together with confusing rules and enforcement often characterize the institutional context of policy implementation and regulatory compliance in developing countries. By connecting such contextual features to existing models of policy implementation and regulatory compliance, we examine how regulatory factors are related to basic and proactive corporate environmental management practices in the Pearl River Delta region in China. Drawing on data derived from both a survey and in‐depth interviews, we show that a perception of clear political commitment to environmental protection across multiple government levels and units is positively associated with business efforts in basic environmental practices, regardless of the specific enforcement intensity. Nevertheless, a perception of clear political commitment is not related to proactive environmental practices. Conversely, a perception of policy ambiguity, in the form of confusing regulatory standards and enforcement, is negatively associated with corporate efforts in both basic and proactive environmental practices; yet, intensive inspections mitigate these negative associations with policy ambiguity.     

Primitive Liberals and Pirate Tribes: Black-Flag Radicalism and the Kibbo Kift

ABSTRACT

The Age of Catastrophe (1914–1945) has long been considered a crisis of liberalism. As a political platform and moralistic worldview, the hollowness of liberalism’s promise was exposed when total war struck at the heart of Europe, undermining its presumption of imperial hegemony over much of the world. What emerged in its wake, amid the swells of irremediable nationalisms, is the subject of this article. Blinded by the fog of war and bright lights of modernity, historians often fail to catch the glimpses of alternative aspirations, which escaped the age’s ruptures so as to reinvent and redeem humanity from the depths of its bloody past. Against a backdrop of neglected case studies from Britain and elsewhere – from the Luddites to the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift – this article seeks to show how the spectre of death inspired new ideals of youth and civility that rejected the arrogance of imperial masculinity and industrialised oppression, turning instead to visions of global kinship that were socialist and anarchic, romantic and utopian, primitive and piratical.     

Smells like politics: planning and the inconvenient politics of intensive peri‐urban agriculture

Intensive farming is an increasing part of Australian agriculture, including in the multi‐functional landscapes at the edges of Australian cities. The example of intensive “broiler” poultry production reveals the tensions that arise when sites of hyper‐productivity conflict with social change in rural areas. Planning processes for intensive farming in the Australian state of Victoria are predicated on stability and consensus: on assumed static and uncontroversial ideas of agriculture, its place, and the primacy of agricultural productivity. Yet concerns about the industrialisation of agriculture are live political issues at the local level, especially in dynamic peri‐urban locations. This paper explores the emergence of a politics of place outside the bounds of planning consensus through an analysis of planning appeals and associated media relating to planning permits for intensive poultry developments in Victoria over 2011–2016. We highlight tensions that exist in relation to technical planning assessments and categorisations used to assert farming as the orthodox use of rural land, especially when new forms of farming look and feel demonstrably different. Using Mouffe's problematising of the negation of antagonism and Rancière's notion of the risks of a false consensus democracy, we argue that planning processes for intensive farming illustrate critical issues in participatory planning. While ostensibly post‐political decision‐making narrows the politics of place and food systems to decisions about policing the boundaries and buffer distances placed around intensive poultry developments, alternative representations of rural life persist. The certainty offered by code‐based planning does not negate the ongoing (if inconvenient) politics of intensive peri‐urban agriculture.     

The 1892 General Election and the Eclipse of the Liberal Unionists

This article seeks to establish that the 1892 general election marked a major change in the relative positions of the parties in the Unionist alliance. Not only did it reveal the limitations of the Liberal Unionist Party's strategy and appeal in an age of increasingly organised, mass politics, but it also acted as a brake on the ambitions of the new leader of the Liberal Unionists in the house of commons, Joseph Chamberlain. It argues that the Liberal Unionist Party suffered a more severe setback in 1892 than has been recognized hitherto and that Chamberlain's attempts to revive his party both before and after the general election were now prescribed by the reality of the political position in which the party now found itself. Rather than regarding the fluid political circumstances of the 1890s as the outcome of an emerging struggle between increasingly polarised ideologies, it seeks to reinforce the significance of local political circumstances and the efficacy of party management in the growing dominance of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour and the Conservative central organisers.     

Structural Investigation of 18th-Century Ogival Masonry Domes: From Carlo Fontana to Bernardo Vittone

In this study a structural investigation on the ogival masonry domes is performed with particular attention to the significant debate between mathematicians and architects mainly of the French and Italian schools that characterized the 18th century. In this period, analytical approaches to investigate the static of dome structures were developed concurrently for the affirmation of the proportional methods, as reported in several architectural treatises in which graphical constructions for the design of masonry domes can be found. It is well known that Carlo Fontana, in 1694, was the first to show in detail the geometrical rules for the design of a masonry dome. Later, in 1760, the Italian architect Bernardo Antonio Vittone proposed some variations to the rules written by Fontana in order to increase the height of the dome and the slope of the meridian section at the intersection with the lantern. In this study, Vittone’s dome has been analyzed and compared with Fontana’s dome by means of an analytical approach that also considers the influence of the lantern at the top. The obtained results confirm that Vittone’s rules lead not only to architectural, but also structural improvements.     

Political theory in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The place of political theory in AJPS has historically been a fairly marginal one, partly because Australia does not seem to have a strong national tradition of political theorizing. This is thought to be a function of living in a nation that never produced a great political theorist and was born neither in revolution or utopianism. Yet, although there has been a marked absence of high theory or exegetically-inclined history of ideas over the life of the journal, theorists have responded by contributing work that usefully illuminates applied problems with theoretical insight. Further, it may be the case that there is a peculiarly Australian style of political theory that is pragmatic and self-consciously embedded within our institutions and political culture. The paper explores this and other means by which Australian theorists have adapted in order to retain a presence within the journal.     

International relations and foreign policy in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS) has evolved from a publication that deliberately relegated articles in international relations (IR) to a secondary status to one that has defined and encouraged leading-edge contributions to that field. This development can be attributed to successive AJPS editorial teams’ realisation that contemporary political problems are increasingly interconnected and that emerging approaches to IR reflect this condition. Several recent and key IR debates that have emerged within the journal’s pages are assigned special attention here: the linking of Australia’s domestic politics to that country’s foreign policy interests and behaviour; in-depth discussions that relate to ongoing trends in the international political economy; critical analysis of national defence and regional security postures; and diverse theoretical perspectives that are increasingly shaping the IR field’s paradigmatic identity. It is concluded that the AJPS is now a leading source of IR thought and discourse.     

Political chess and vernacular discursive strategies: A study of the late Qing Sichuan Railway Protection Movement

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary literary and historical studies of late Qing vernacular are rare, and the vernacular texts of the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement have been overlooked by academics. This paper focuses on this topic, arguing that the discursive strategies in such texts revolved around the movement's aim of “breaking the agreement and protecting the railway,” and primarily included discourses on constitutionalism, financial interests, patriotism, cultural order, and the late emperor, as well the ideas of “ridding the emperor of evil ministers,” borrowed from traditional Chinese political discourses, and “national subjugation,” within the context of the national crisis. None of these discourses were “anti-Manchu” or “revolutionary,” yet they were able to mobilize the people of Sichuan to devote themselves to the Railway Protection Movement, as well as attracting the “sympathetic understanding” of high-ranking Sichuan officials, such as Wang Renwen 王人文 and Zhao Erfeng 赵尔丰, thus lending discursive power to the railway protection camp in its game of political chess with the Qing court. Meanwhile, the government's weak discursive power was an important factor in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty by the revolutionary tide triggered by the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement. The discursive strategies in vernacular texts on railway protection (including the particularly strategic discourse on the late emperor) spread, transformed, and were reborn to varying degrees over the course of history.     

ARRIVAL OF COURTLY LOVE: MOVING IN THE EMOTIONAL SPACE

Courtly love appeared in twelfth‐century Europe as a dissent from the emotional regime established by the Gregorian Reform, by setting the lady, instead of God, as the object of worship. From a game‐theory perspective, courtly love and hedonism correspond to Nash equilibria, in contrast to Christian marriage, whose stability is threatened by sex‐as‐appetite on one side and devotion to God on the other, and whose maintenance depends on moral control. The Church developed fear and shame, which are counter‐emotions to desire‐as‐appetite. Courtly love restored the thrill of forbidden adventure. It also shared traits common to innovations in the natural world: it added complexity (by increasing costs, emphasizing courtship, self‐restraint, and extremes of suffering); it was made possible by the plasticity of mating relationships; it introduced a small disorder in the ordered regime of Christian marriage; it demanded an adaptive effort, requiring the man to face ever more perilous trials and the woman to appear ever more attractive. Though obtained as a small deviation from the existing emotional regime, it had thoroughgoing and long‐lasting consequences for social control and for the political power of the Church. It also deeply modified the dynamic of longing in ego's representation. By taking the temporal form of a capture, it contrasts with twelfth‐century Bengal, where love was characterized by maintenance in an indefinitely repeating worship, by the absence of a here‐now versus target‐later dualism. It also contrasts with eleventh‐century Heian Japan, where love was intermingled with the melancholy of an impossible return, which is the antithesis of the concept of capture.