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The purpose of this paper is to explore economic conditions of contemporary society to provide insight into the ways in which the consequences of disaster, including environmental migration, are accentuated.

This research draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity and notions of development to analyse disaster. From the analysis, a new concept, liquid development, is proposed and critiqued as a contributing factor leading to severe contemporary disaster.

Liquid development provides a new way of making sense of the conditions and consequences of economic growth and a business as usual attitude. It further provides a framework to explore the potential disaster of environmental migration in the Pacific Islands arising from liquid development driven climate change-induced sea level rise.

Analysing these conditions provides greater understanding of the resulting impact of disaster, creating awareness and informing the need for accountability and social policy. This study aims to contribute to further practical and research enquiry that will challenge liquid developers to reconsider their impact and to accept responsibility for vulnerable members of society as part of their business as usual structure.

This paper adds to Bauman’s understanding of the consequences of globalisation through the construct of liquid development. It also continues his debate by giving awareness to the global issue of environmental migration.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between perceived investments in employees’ development (PIED) on work engagement and the moderating effects of psychological capital on this relationship for liquid knowledge workers, employed in the Indian cutting and polishing of diamond industry (CPD).

A questionnaire composed of established scales was administered to 134 liquid knowledge workers. Having established convergent and discriminant validity using structural equation modelling, the model was further analysed using the Process macro to check for direct and moderating effects.

The research findings suggest that the perceived investment in employee development and psychological contract enhancement (relational and transactional) made by CPD units for liquid knowledge workers positively influenced their work engagement level. The study also finds that relational contract (not transactional contract) positively moderates the relationship between perceived investment in employee development and work engagement.

This is a cross-sectional single source study; future studies could look at longitudinal and multisource perspective.

The study presents a “star matrix of engagement” that guides the application of the two strategies of perceived employee development and psychological contract enhancement for liquid knowledge workers. This has implications for design and implementation of human resource management practices and policies for employee management.

The study makes significant contributions to existing literature on antecedents of work engagement of liquid knowledge workers by examining the direct and moderating influences.

Agency development is inherently a process of institutional evolution. The purpose of this part 2 (of a 3 part) paper is to explore development in the political context, producing a cultural model of political development as institutional evolution, explaining how political groups may come to power culturally. This requires a detailed examination of culture and cultural change, and a study of strategic political frames that define political groups seeking support for political power from agents in a political sphere. During cultural instabilities or social crises, frames may become cynical and embrace liquid persuasion and hence populism.

A cultural model for political development is created involving three variables (emotional climate, cultural order and compliance). This enables cultural comparison of different political groups. Strategic political frames are examined to understand how those vying for agency power may attract support from agents in the activity system. Liquid frames are also explored to understand the cynical nature of populism and its contribution to institutional devolution.

A political development theory result that identifies the conditions under which formal political groups can promote frames that may attract support from agents from who they require support to gain agency power status. A model is produced for political development. It explains populism as a thin ideology with a collectivist orientation that uses liquid framing, and it introduces its individualist counterpart, political synergism.

The implication of this research is that it will allow empirical methods to be used that potentially enable political outcomes in complex political environments to be anticipated, given additional appropriate measurement criteria.

Linking agency and institutional theory to explain the process of development is new, as is its application to the political development process in a political landscape. As part of this linkage, it has been shown how Bauman’s concept of liquidity relates to Sorokin’s ideas of socio-cultural change.

Agency involves dynamic socio-cultural processes that facilitate development. This paper is written in three parts. In Part 1, there are two purposes, the first purpose is to intimately connect agency and institutional theory, and the second purpose is to explore the relationship between agency development and growth and globalisation. In Part 2, the purpose will be to explore development with respect to the political context by explaining in terms of culture under what conditions political groups may come to power. Using political frames intended to define their nature and realities, political groups seek to attract agents in their political sphere to gain administrative power. In Part 3, the purpose will be to model, using cybernetic agency theory, the nature of development and its reduction to instrumentality.

In this part of the three-part paper, development theory is explained as a multidisciplinary field in which research and theories are clustered together and set within an adaptive institutional activity system framework. An adaptive activity system has a plural membership of agents represented by agency. Agency represents an activity system that will be argued to operate through its institutional metasystem. This enables activity system development to be explained as a process of institutional evolution. In Part 1, the problem will be addressed of how the relationship between agency and institution enables institutional change. To resolve this agency will be shown to be institutional in nature, and agency development as a process of institutional evolution. To distinguish between development and growth/globalisation, agency will be taken to have an internal and external context. Distinction will then be made between development as an internal attribute of agency and its consequences, which may include the external attributes of growth/globalisation. It will also be explained that development may have a less desirable condition when it becomes liquid.

The three-part paper develops a political development theory that identifies the conditions under which formal political groups are able to promote frames of policy to attract support from autonomous agents that constitute the membership of the activity system, and hence gain agency status. Furthermore, Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity is connected to Sorokin’s theory of socio-cultural dynamics and cultural stability. One result is the notion of liquid development, an unstable condition of development in adaptive activity systems.

The implication of this research is that, given additional appropriate measurement criteria, it will allow conceptual and empirical methods to be used that will potentially enable political outcomes in complex socio-political environments to be anticipated.

The implication of this research is that it will allow empirical methods to be used that potentially enables political outcomes in complex socio-political environments to be anticipated, given additional appropriate measurement criteria.

The synergy of agency and institutional theories to explain the process of development is new, as well as its application to the political development process in a political landscape. As part of this synergistic process, Bauman’s concept of liquidity is shown to relate to Sorokin’s ideas of socio-cultural change.

Agency is inherently an institution and involves dynamic socio-cultural processes that facilitate development. This paper is written in three parts. The purpose in Part 1 was to represent agency theory as an institutional theory, and consideration was made of the relationship between development, growth and globalisation. In Part 2, the purpose was to explore development with respect to the political context, explaining in terms of culture under what conditions political groups may come to power. Using political frames intended to define their nature and realities, they seek to attract agents in their political sphere to gain administrative power. In this Part 3, the purpose of this paper is to model, using cybernetic agency theory, the nature of development and reduction to instrumentality.

Development theory is a multidisciplinary field in which research and theories are clustered together and set within an adaptive institutional activity system framework. An adaptive activity system has a plural membership of agents represented by agency. In Parts 1 and 2 of this paper, agency was shown to have an institutional basis. Activity system development was also explained as a process of institutional evolution, and its potential was shown to provide power acquisition in a political landscape by competitive political frames which vie for support in a place of potentially susceptible agents. Here in Part 3, agency theory will be used to model the dynamic relationships between political frames and the agents that they wish to attract by projecting both cognitive and emotional structures, this enabling the anticipation of behaviour.

These relate to the three parts of the paper taken together. Agency is an evolutionary institutional system that can represent socio-political development. A model for political development has been created that identifies the conditions under which formal political groups are able to promote frames of policy to attract support from autonomous agents that constitute the membership of the activity system, and hence gain agency status. On the way to this, it connects Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity to Sorokin’s theory of socio-cultural dynamics and cultural stability. One result is the notion of liquid development, an unstable condition of development in adaptive activity systems. Agency theory can usefully explain detailed changes in agency, the relationships between agency agents, and interactions between agencies, this embracing institutional processes.

The implication of this research is that it will allow empirical methods to be used that potentially enables political outcomes in complex socio-political environments to be anticipated, given additional appropriate measurement criteria.

The synergy of agency and institutional theories to explain the process of development is new, as is its application to the political development process in a political landscape. As part of this synergistic process, it has been shown how Bauman’s concept of liquidity relates to Sorokin’s ideas of socio-cultural change.

Macro‐environmental scanning is a first step in strategic planning, which is essential in an emerging industry such as liquid biofuels. The purpose of this paper is to identify the dimensions within which the governments of Brazil, the USA and Germany have constructed the macro‐environment for liquid biofuels over time and to test for similarities between the governments’ constructs.

Documentary research was carried out on official public policies and program documents on the topic of liquid biofuels, covering a ten‐year period from 1997 to 2006. The database consisted of 624 documents from the Brazilian government, 854 from the American government and 168 documents from the German government. Text mining was used to extract information from the texts by applying a specific analysis structure that was built on macro‐environmental dimensions as expressed by their respective dimensional words “d‐words”. The “d‐words” were selected based on their usage frequency in the knowledge fields related to each dimension.

The results indicate that the macro‐environments for liquid biofuels, as configured by the governments under analysis, differ systematically and over time in their emphasis of specific macro‐environmental dimensions.

There are two primary aspects of this study which are original and valuable: the application of text‐mining techniques as a tool for strategic planning and the development of a particular tool to extract knowledge from text documents and to categorize them according to their macro‐environmental dimensions.

The U.S. Congress has been struggling to create a comprehensive energy program. A key component of the present attempt, recommended by President Carter, is a synthetic fuel program. In July of 1979, the President asked for an $88 billion “crash program” to encourage development of synthetic fuels. To date, a three month struggle to reach a consensus between House and Senate conferees has brought only limited results. Compromise is emerging in the form of a proposal for a “synthetic fuels corporation.” The body would have the authority to disperse $20 billion in the form of federal loan guarantees and purchase agreements with more money to become available later.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impact of financial development on poverty reduction in developing countries. The paper also investigates whether financial development affects poverty via institutional quality and GDP growth.

To take into account the dynamics nature of panel data and country-specific effects, the authors use a two-step system GMM estimator. The authors also employ a large array of measures of financial development in order to check the robustness of the results. The analysis is carried out for a sample of developing countries using an unbalanced panel data set covering the period 1985-2008.

The authors find that financial development plays a significant role in reducing absolute poverty. However, the authors do not find any pro-poor impact of financial development when poverty is measured in relative terms. The authors show that the impact of financial development on poverty alleviation is statistically significant when liquid liabilities and credit granted to the private sector are used as a proxy of financial development. The results on the indirect effect of financial development indicate that financial sector development has larger effects on poverty reduction when institutional arrangements are sound or/and when economic growth is high.

The findings suggest that the inference for a pro-poor effect of financial development depends primarily on the measure of poverty and the choice of the proxy for financial development. Banking sector reforms may be an effective instrument to tackle absolute levels poverty. However, the policy makers should not rely only on financial reforms, regardless of whether they are based on banks or stock markets, to narrow the gap between the poorest quintile of the population and the richer quintiles. Rather, they should also utilize fiscal policies, such as progressive taxation and public-expenditure projects, to redistribute resources.

The paper differs from the previous studies in several ways. First, it studies the financial development-poverty nexus using three alternative indices of poverty. Second, this study focusses on a sample of developing countries only. As the structure and development level of the financial sector in poor and rich countries could differ significantly, focussing on developing countries helps mitigate the problem of heterogeneity arising from using a pooled sample of rich and poor countries. Third, robust estimation methods are applied that take into account the dynamic nature of empirical models and country-specific effects.

FOR many years the basic design and construction of aircraft has been closely linked with the cooling system employed for the power plant which it is desired to utilise and as a general rule machines have been produced specifically for either liquid‐ or air‐cooled engines. Conversions of liquid‐cooled engined machines to suit an air‐cooled installation and vice versa have been successfully carried out in the past and to‐day there is a tendency for twin‐engined military aircraft to be constructed so that alternative installations may be employed, but the complications necessitated by such a practice provide good reason for producing the airframe to suit one particular engine. The general recognition of this policy has served to emphasise the importance of deciding the type of engine most suitable for the purpose for which the machine is required and has possibly lent weight to the claims submitted by various engine manufacturers. The merits of one variety of engine as opposed to the other is a subject which has from time to time received much attention, but, as the object of this article is to trace the development of liquid‐cooling systems, a brief outline of what is considered parallel advancement in air‐cooled practice may be of interest.

Liquid encapsulation techniques have been used extensively in advanced semiconductor packaging, including applications of underfilling, cavity‐filling, and glob top encapsulation. Because of the advanced encapsulation materials and the automatic liquid dispensing equipment involved, it is very important to understand the encapsulation material characteristics, equipment characteristics, encapsulation process development techniques in order to achieve the encapsulation quality and reliability. In this paper, the authors will examine the various considerations in liquid encapsulation applications and address the concerns on material characterization, automatic liquid dispensing equipment/process characterization and the encapsulation quality and reliability. The discussions will be helpful for future material and process development of semiconductor packages.