IS TRUST A DRIVER FOR TERRITORIALLY EMBEDDED INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS? A CASE STUDY OF THE HOME‐BUILDING INDUSTRY IN NORWAY

Trust is said to be necessary for creating and maintaining territorially embedded industrial systems. On the basis of data for the Norwegian home‐building sector, this article analyses trust and price competition; how trust is built and dismantled; and trust and place. The main findings are that: trust and price competition interact, but trust is more important in the design and planning phases than in the construction phase; economic factors are important for building trust, together with competence and team work; and trust is related to space, partly through places embodied in trust and partly through trust embedded in places. However, this embeddedness is not like that which has long been claimed to exist in territorially embedded industrial systems, but embeddedness where trust acts as a reinforcement, contingent upon other factors, as a capacity restraint and a socially constructed need for face‐to‐face meetings.     

Eighth annual meeting of the international society for the history of the neurosciences hosting the Ninth meeting of the european club for the history of neurology JULY 7–10, 2003

Damasio (1994) claims that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity separate from the body, and that the effort to understand the mind in general biological terms was retarded as a consequence of Descartes dualism. These claims do not hold; they are Damasios error. Descartes never considered what we today call thinking or cognition without taking the body into account. His new dualism required an embodied understanding of cognition. The article gives an historical overview of the development of Descartes radically new psychology from his account of algebraic reasoning in the early Regulae (1628) to his neurobiology of rationality in the late Passions of the soul (1649). The author argues that Descartes dualism opens the way for mechanistic and mathematical explanations of all kinds of physiological and psychological phenomena, including the kind of phenomena Damasio discusses in Descartes error. The models of understanding Damasio puts forward can be seen as advanced version of models which Descartes introduced in the 1640s. A far better title for his book would have been Descartes vision.     

Sources of Damasios Error A Reply to Damasio

Lina Stern (1878–1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist, was born in Russia. She studied at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where, after graduating, she conducted original research in physiology and biochemistry. In 1918, Stern was the first woman to be awarded a professional title at the University of Geneva and headed the department of Physiological Chemistry. She is deservedly considered to be one of the first scientists to entertain the concept of a blood-brain barrier. In 1929, Stern founded the Institute of Physiology in Moscow, of which she was director until 1948, when it was discontinued. Under her leadership, multidisciplinary groups of colleagues worked on the problems of the blood-brain and tissue-brain barriers and homeostasis of the brain. In 1939, Stern was elected full member of the Academy of Sciences and became its first female member ever.

Most scientists manage to conduct their research by adjusting to the political and social situations surrounding them. Lina Stern did not follow this path. This small woman of complete devotion to science took the drastic decisions that altered her life. Though destiny was not kind to her, Lina Stern did not compromise. Despite a threat of execution, prolonged imprisonment, and exile she was never broken as a scientist and always maintained her dignity.     

A Network Approach to Commuting

In this paper we present a model for commuting in a network of towns. A basic assumption is that all individuals have a given residential location and that every node in the network has a fixed number of jobs. We then propose a general model for the commuting of labor between the nodes in the network.     

Passion and compassion of god in the old testament

Abstract

The point of departure is the Kitamorian “Pain of God Theology”. However, the present survey is that of exegesis and of biblical theology. We pose the question whether the concept of the “immutability of God” is that of the OT? We believe our focal texts (Hos 11,8; Jer 31,20; Isa 63, 9+15) do challenge that notion. The righteous God of Israel is not presented as a vindictive god, who delights in judgement. Rather, the glimpses of God's “emotions”, read “passions”, suggest a more complex God‐image. The righteousness of God demands judgement, whereas his compassion finds another solution. We find that female and masculine imagery in connection with God's attitude and feelings toward his people, are frequently interchangeable. The all‐embracing motherly love of God may be seen as an expression of God's heart in tension between inevitable judgement and compassionate love. But the same aspect may also be expressed in the father/son relationship. The passion of God in OT is not a static or inherent condition of God's being. Rather, the anthropomorphic (or, anthropopatic) expressions may be glimpses of a rare “I‐You” relationship between God and his people Israel. The passion of God then becomes the most profound expression of God's dynamic response to man's fatal situation.     

Finance,Home Building,and Urban Residential Structuring

Abstract: The aim of this article is to improve our understanding of finance in home building by introducing an actor perspective in structure‐oriented theories of capital circulation. David Harvey's three‐circuit theory, with fixity‐motion processes and (de‐/re)‐territorialisation, is taken as the starting point. The analysis is based on a case study of Norwegian home‐building finance, outlining the emerging structure of housing and finance under the Norwegian version of neoliberalism; comprising deregulation and re‐regulation phases. The article delineates today's home‐building finance, and identifies large banks, small banks, large investment funds and small investment funds as structural actors operating within actual fixity and motion processes, causing a distinct territorialisation of urban landscapes, as exemplified by gentrification.     

Theoretical reflections

The article starts with a discussion about the frequent statement that culture is a marginal area in politics. It proceeds with an analysis of the phenomenon and concept of “the cultural turn” and its possible consequences for cultural democracy. Then there follows a reflection on the potential power of religion and culture in political developments. After these introductory sections I present and discuss what I call five “democracy dimensions” of cultural policy: norms and ideologies; distribution of economic resources; institutional structures and decision‐making procedures; agents and interests in the policy‐making process; and access to and participation in cultural life. The conclusion is that under certain circumstances culture may mobilise huge masses of people in political actions but this is unlikely to happen in Western European democracies where culture in a long historical process has been privatised and isolated from big politics by the establishment of a specific sphere with its own structures, norms, logics and discourses. It is questionable if cultural policies will be more democratic under the reign of global capitalism and new liberalism. “The cultural turn” is an ambivalent phenomenon which cannot by itself bring about more cultural democracy. The future of cultural democracy cannot be decided for by cultural life or the cultural policy system themselves, it is dependent on what will happen to democracy as a total political system, of which cultural policy is only a small part.