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Why did peasants in old-regime Europe scatter their land in small strips within open fields? According to an influential theory advocated by Deirdre McCloskey, the system’s main aim was risk reduction. By spreading out land, peasants were less exposed to the caprices of nature: heavy rains, droughts, frost, or hailstorms. In a time when other insurance institutions were lacking, this approach could be a rational solution, even if, as McCloskey suggests, it could be achieved only at the expense of overall agricultural productivity.

Over the years, McCloskey’s theory has repeatedly been debated. Still, it has never been empirically established to what extent the open fields actually reduced risk. McCloskey offered only indirect evidence, based on hypothetical calculations from short series demesne level yields. Risks on enclosed and open-field land farms were thus never compared.

This chapter presents farm-level harvest variation series, including observations from both types of land. It is based on tithe records of 1,700 farms in Southern Sweden from 1715–1860. Results show that scattering had a limited effect on agricultural risk. The system did protect against small-scale local crop failures. It was less efficient, however, when it came to the large-scale regional harvest disasters that constituted a much more serious threat to peasants of the time. From this perspective, the inner logic of the open-field system is taken up for renewed consideration.

Much of human behaviour is viewed as a process, which begins with early childhood experience, and develops into later life emotions, values, beliefs, and behaviours. Described below, considerable interdisciplinary attention has been given to the role of childhood, and more specifically, to the relevance of different types of parental influence on children as they later become adults. Within marketing, selected scholarly consideration has been devoted to the roles of parents on their children's existing consumer behaviour. The unique contribution of this article is to examine the role of different types of parental influence on later adulthood shopping behaviours.

This paper poses the question of whether the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, in concentrating its efforts on achieving gender parity in the existing workplace, is selling women short. In it, I argue that contemporary U.S. feminism has not adequately theorized the problems with the relatively unregulated market system in the United States. That failure has contributed to a situation in which women’s participation in the labor market is mistakenly equated with liberation, and in which other far-ranging effects of the market system on women’s lives inside and outside of work – many of them negative – are overlooked. To theorize the effects of the market system on women’s lives in a more nuanced manner, I borrow from the insights of earlier Marxist and socialist feminists. I then use this more nuanced perspective to outline an agenda for feminism, which I call “market-cautious feminism,” that seeks to regulate the market to serve women’s interests.

This paper attempts to trace and describe the role played by the government sector – the state – in promoting economic growth in Western societies since the Renaissance. One important conclusion is that the antagonism between state and market, which has characterised the twentieth century, is a relatively new phenomenon. Since the Renaissance one very important task of the state has been to create well‐functioning markets by providing a legal framework, standards, credit, physical infrastructure and – if necessary – to function temporarily as an entrepreneur of last resort. Early economists were acutely aware that national markets did not occur spontaneously, and they used “modern” ideas like synergies, increasing returns, and innovation theory when arguing for the right kind of government policy. In fact, mercantilist economics saw it as a main task to extend the synergetic economic effects observed within cities to the territory of a nation‐state. The paper argues that the classical Anglo‐Saxon tradition in economics – fundamentally focused on barter and distribution, rather than on production and knowledge – systematically fails to grasp these wider issues in economic development, and it brings in and discusses the role played by the state in alternative traditions of non‐equilibrium economics.

By taking conventionalist view of the evolution of biotechnology, we suggest that the process by which entrepreneurs determined what made biotechnology valuable and figured out how to organize around such an economic logic was contested. The shape that biotechnology has ultimately taken emerged from the resolution of these contests. Convention theory – as elaborated in Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) On Justification ¹ – argues that our economy is shaped by participants affecting the rules of economic action. Whereas most economists would argue that the assignment of value underpins any system of exchange, conventionalists suggest that this value is not only given by the principles of optimization but instead can be derived from many possible spheres such as civic duty, attainment of fame, proof of technologic performance, and demonstration of creativity. More specifically, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006, p. 43) claim that the establishment of a particular logic “comes about as a part of a coordinated process that relies on two supports: a common identification of market goods, whose exchange defines the course of action, and a common evaluation of these objects in terms of prices that make it possible to adjust various actions.” Simply put, economic logics embody principles of economic coordination or conventions that guide interpretation of the technology and its value.

This paper aims to describe a new application of Zotero, a citation management system, for embedded librarianship and assessment. It explores student reception of this approach and maps Zotero’s capacities to represent citations to learning outcomes and information literacy frames that instruction librarians assess.

The librarian worked with a course using Zotero group libraries for collaborative work, used Zotero to communicate with students and assess their information literacy skills and surveyed the students to determine their perception of librarian participation via Zotero.

Using Zotero’s features made it possible to formatively and summatively assess student work quickly, and students were receptive to librarian participation via Zotero.

This suggests that librarians facing difficulty embedding in online courses or those seeking to assess student work may wish to explore Zotero as a sustainable solution to both challenges.

This paper posits a solution to common challenges for online embedded librarianship and suggests a new technique for assessing student information literacy in a context that supports information literacy.

When an individual decides to go into business, it can be an intimidating experience for him or her because of the many important business decisions to be made prior to entering the free market. In unforeseen ways, these decisions can have a tremendous impact on the operation and ultimate success of a new business.

Recently, American social behavior during the 1980s has been compared, both favorably and unfavorably, with the attitudes and culture of the United States during the years 1950–1959. The past two decades of rebellion, student protest, liberal sexual practices, radical politics, and strong civil and women's rights movements have all passed.

Using the Internet for electronic business has become an area of action for the Australian government. This paper presents research results from two regional areas, which indicate that while most manufacturing SMEs use e‐mail, very few are involved in electronic commerce activities. Major barriers are concern about security and privacy of transactions, cost of consultants, and lack of IT expertise of staff. Employing people with appropriate knowledge has been added to current training methods such as on‐the‐job training. Results from the two regional areas are found to be consistent. Comparisons between small and medium organisations highlight some differences.