Search results

Purpose – This chapter examines the risk of a hostile incursion as perceived by Fremont farmers living in the Range Creek area of Utah, 700–1700 years ago.

Methodology/approach – We build two simple financial portfolio models where agents (Fremont farmers) choose optimal locations to store grain based on a trade-off between ease of access during normal times and difficulty of confiscation during a hostile incursion. We calibrate our model using the observed distances and difficulty of access to granaries measured in caloric costs.

Findings – We find that even low or moderate probabilities of an incursion rationalize the use of cliff granaries. Risk on the order of a 5–25% chance per year makes building, maintaining, and transporting grain to a cliff granary worthwhile.

Social implications – Our research does not rule out other motives for granary construction. However, it does show that a small threat of hostilities can explain the observed location of granaries in Range Creek and other areas of Fremont habitation.

Originality/value of chapter – This research is unique in its application of standard financial portfolio theory (normally dealing with optimal holdings of risky financial assets) to the problem of deducing perceived risk. To our knowledge, this is the first use of these rational financial models in the context of a human population that has left no explicit economic evidence such as prices or transaction records.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Purpose – With reference to the long-term struggle to confirm cigarette smoking as a manifestation of nicotine addiction, this chapter explores the extent to which new understandings of addictions as ‘appetitive disorders’ rather than ‘dependence disorders’ derive from treatment technology development as well as advances in basic scientific research.

Approach – Through historical analysis it is discussed how cigarette smoking only became widely accepted as a real drug problem in the 1980s after it had been shown to be amenable to treatment as such through the use of novel nicotine replacement therapies.

Findings – These replacement therapies succeeded in showing that the same drug that drew users into addiction could be redeployed to help draw up them out of it. Nicorette® could serve as at least the partial antidote to nico-wrong (cigarettes). However, as relapse to smoking has remained the most likely outcome of any smoking cessation attempt, so medicinal nicotine has also served to demonstrate that nicotine addiction is ultimately a problem of an uncontrollable appetite for cigarettes in excess of drug dependence.

Implications – Pharmaceutical incursion on cigarette smoking commencing in the late 1970s pointed to the need for a new mental disease model of drug-related problems while also providing valuable new tools and insights for ensuing brain research.

This chapter investigates the “pulsations” of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3,000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads. This chapter formulates a strategy of data gathering, system modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came into being.

Wal-Mart has had a major impact on both retailing and the U.S. economy in general through its supply chain management, efficiency, cost-containment, outsourcing, and market power. We examine Wal-Mart's strategy in retailing and its likely impact as it begins to make incursions into health care from the perspective of strategic entrepreneurship (SE) theory. Wal-Mart's resources including an expansion focus, low-cost culture, supply chain management, adoption of new technology, and market intelligence are described and related to the SE model. In addition, Wal-Mart's current health care services and target markets are outlined. This is the first paper which comprehensively outlines the competitive threat which Wal-Mart poses to traditional health care providers and insurers. The paper concludes with implications for the health care industry, future predictions, and potential future research.

Review essay on Wade Hands’, Reflection without Rules: Economic Methodology and Contemporary Science Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wade Hands’ Reflection without Rules is the best book in town for the student who wants to get acquainted with the field of economic methodology. Just like Mark Blaug’s The Methodology of Economics and Bruce Caldwell’s Beyond Positivism during the 1980s and the 1990s, Reflection introduces the reader to the debate in the area, in all its complexity and with many of its details, yet in a clear and logical manner. The book reproduces portions of the author’s earlier articles published since 1985 in different periodicals and books. Hands successfully achieves his goal of building a survey of recent developments in the field of economic methodology in a book that can be praised for its comprehensive outlook; its wide array of subject-matters; successful incursions into the neighboring fields of epistemology, philosophy, rhetoric, sociology of knowledge and others; its clear discussion of relevant topics, following a logical order; and its full coverage of the available literature, with the impressive reference list of more than 1,200 entries.

Partnerships between universities and secondary schools are highly valued for a range of pedagogical, transition and outreach benefits to students, teachers and more broadly, society. Teachers in schools provide a rich insight into how university teaching staff can better engage students and provide them with deeper learning experiences. Universities can provide on-campus student incursions for learning activities, work experience opportunities, research projects with academics and lectures by specialist researchers. This chapter describes the range of benefits arising from a partnership, established in 2009, between the John Monash Science School (JMSS) and Monash University, co-located in outer suburban of Melbourne, Australia. The JMSS–Monash partnership has generated a number of innovative and dynamic educational programmes, which have positively impacted the learning and engagement of students across geographic divides. The partnership is rich, and has broadened and deepened as the partners have learned more about each other’s capacities, and envisioned what is possible in an educational landscape bereft of innovation and challenge to existing norms. By thinking creatively and acting bravely, the partners have shone a light on a brighter future in science for Australian students.

Equestrian sports offer a rare opportunity to bring male and female athletes together as competitors and team members, and women's historic participation in this field has been on the rise worldwide. Nonetheless, as our own previous research on the elite world of show jumping has shown, there are a series of cultural and institutional factors that have operated – within the Brazilian context – to restrict horsewomen's access to the highest international levels and thereby acquire the visibility, success and celebrity status that have been awarded to its most prominent male equestrians. Women's entrance into the still very masculine world of horse racing has proven even more difficult. The work presented here, part of a broader ethnographic study of gender, space and sport at the racetrack, looks at the paths taken by young Brazilian women jockeys – in this case, of predominantly poor and working class origin – in their pioneering incursion into the male preserve of the turf. We focus on questions of subjectivity, construction of identities and negotiation of space, insofar as these processes both reflect and contribute to changing gender relations in contemporary Brazilian society.

This paper introduces the concept of a “computable economy” and discusses how it relates to the emergence of Web3 or the new type of economy that has arisen from the integration of digital technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, and digital identity. A “computable economy” is one where those computational rule systems are integrated into a connected graph, allowing for decentralized cooperation and distributed coordination. This paper traces the trajectory of innovation in the economy from the development of industrial production technologies to the rise of information and communication technology (ICT) and the digital economy. It argues that the shift to a “computable economy” is a consequence of the transformation of analog economic institutions into natively digital institutions. This results in a “full stack” digital economy where all economic actions can be digitally constructed and implemented. This paper concludes by discussing the potential of Web3 to create a new type of economy, that is, “techno-utopian” and characterized by human flourishing, as the incursion of machines and computation leads to a new era of economic growth and transformation.