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.     

Book reviews

CHINA

TANG KWOK‐LEUNG. Colonial State and Social Policy: social Welfare Development in Hong Kong 1842–1997. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. 192 pp. US$36.00, hardcover.

ZHENG YONGNIAN. Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: modernity, Identity, and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 208 pp. US$54.95, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

STEVAN HARRELL, BAMO QUBUMO and MA ERZI (photographs by Zhong Dakun). Mountain Patterns, The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2000. Colour and black‐and‐white illustrations. No price given, paper.

PENG XIZHE with ZHIGANG GUO (eds). The Changing Population of China. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 312 pp. Figures, tables, index. £50.00, US$68.95, hardcover; £15.99, US$31.95, paper.

ROBERT S. ROSS (ed). After the Cold War: domestic Factors and U.S.‐China Relations. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. xiv, 208 pp. Charts, figures, index. US$59.95, hardcover; US$22.95, paper.

PING CHEN. Modern Chinese: history and Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 229 pp. Introduction, tables, notes, references, index. US$59.95, hardcover; US$21.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

MARK R. MULLINS. Christianity Made in Japan: a Study of Indigenous Movements. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998. 288 pp. Illustrations, preface, notes, bibliography, index. US$24.95, paper.

HIROSUKE KAWANISHI (ed). The Human Face of Industrial Conflict in Post‐war Japan. London: Kegan Paul International, 1999. 287 pp. Introduction, chronology of events, translation of Japanese organisational and statutory names, index. US$93.50, hardcover.

YUKIKO KOSHIRO. Trans‐Pacific Racisms and the US Occupation of Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xi, 295 pp. US$21.50, paper.

PHYLLIS BIRNBAUM. Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: five Japanese Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 255 pp. US$29.00; UK£19.95, hardcover.

ROBIN M. LEBLANC. Bicycle Citizens: the Political World of the Japanese Housewife. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 246 pp. US$14.95, paper.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

ROWENA ROBINSON. Conversion, Continuity and Change: lived Christianity in Southern Goa. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 1998. 236 pp. £27.50, hardcover.

RAJAT GANGULY. Kin State Intervention in Ethnic Conflicts: lessons from South Asia. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998.266 pp. Map, notes, bibliography, index. Rs. 350, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

DANNY UNGER. Building Social Capital in Thailand: fibers, Finance, and Infrastructure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 227 pp. A$90.00, hardcover; A$29.95, paper.

JEFFREY R. VINCENT, ROZALI MOHAMED ALI and ASSOCIATES. Environment and Development in a Resource‐Rich Economy: Malaysia Under the New Economic Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 364 pp. Foreword, preface, bibliography, index. US$46.95, hardcover; US$22.95, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

ANITA CHAN, B. J. TRIA KERKVLIET and J. UNGER (eds). Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam Compared. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999. 240 pp. A$24.95, paper.

KURT W. RADTKE and J. A. STAM et al. (eds). Dynamics in Pacific Asia: conflict, Competition and Cooperation. London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1998. 287 pp. US$110, hardcover.

YUE‐MAN YEUNG (ed). Urban Development in Asia: retrospect and Prospect. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia‐Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. 453 pp. Plates, introduction, notes, index. No price given, hardcover.     

"Polyhybrid heterogeneous bastards": promoting medical genetics in America in the 1930s and 1940s

I examine three American researchers in the 1930s and 1940s who populate the no-man's-land of medical genetics, between the heyday of "mainline" eugenics and the medical turn in human genetics in the 1950s. In scientists' narratives, William Allan, Madge Macklin, and Laurence Snyder appear as pioneers of medical genetics and genetic education. Allan was a country doctor with an interest in heredity. Snyder, a Harvard-trained geneticist, entered medical genetics through population-genetic studies of human blood groups. Macklin came from a background in academic medicine. Allan, Snyder, and Macklin believed in a genetic approach to medicine well before genetics offered clinical benefits. Although hereditary diseases had begun to overtake infectious diseases as causes of death and illness, formal genetics offered medicine little more than a few explanatory principles. These researchers made their case by a) listing mostly hopeful potential applications of genetics to disease; b) blurring the distinction between genetics and heredity; and c) engaging in preventive genetic medicine, that is, eugenics. Examining their careers reveals some of the texture of eugenic thought in American medicine as well as the continuities between the early eugenic phase of human genetics and the professional medical genetics that today's practitioners take as the origin of their field.     

The Memory of Slavery at Saint Louis University

This essay examines both the history and memory of slavery at Saint Louis University (SLU). The essay argues that, despite the fact that slavery and slaves featured prominently in the university's early history, later members of the SLU and St. Louis community have forgotten or misremembered the role of human bondage in the school's past. This process of forgetting is particularly notable given the fact that SLU is a Jesuit University that plays a prominent role in the cultural, educational, and economic life of the city of St. Louis. The essay will analyze the process by which the role of slavery at SLU has been forgotten before concluding with suggestions for how the topic might be treated in the future.     

Diet,Mobility, Technology,and Lithics: Neolithization on the Andean Altiplano, 7.0–3.5 ka

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Neolithization was a complex, protracted process of domestication, sedentarization, and technology change that occurred in various combinations in...     

Children of migrants in China in the twenty-first century: trends,living arrangements,age-gender structure,and geography

ABSTRACT

Children – including those of migrants – are China’s future. Children of migrants now make up close to 40% of all children in China. This paper analyzes the recent trends from 2000 to 2016 and the major aspects of the children of migrants by distilling data from multiple large national surveys and assessing the very small rural left-behind children (LBC) population figures published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs in 2016. The paper also develops a method to estimate the LBC population generated by migrants in each provincial destination between 2010 and 2015, linking up different but related populations (adult migrants, migrant children, and LBC) in the origins and destinations. This broader “origin-destination” framework allows us to pinpoint clearly a major driver of LBC and hence to identify provinces needing the most attention in national and provincial efforts to alleviate the problem of LBC.

Abbreviations: MC: Migrant Children; LBC: Left-Behind Children; MPR: Migration Participation Rate: LBCG: Left-Behind Children Generated