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Why and how was the territorialized state form disseminated through colonial expansion? To begin to answer this question, this study proposes a relational account of the production of territorialized state space, drawing on empirical evidence from two understudied cases of colonial expansion in the early 20th century: Spain in Morocco and Italy in Libya. Drawing on colonial and local archival sources, I demonstrate how colonial territoriality resulted from a violent clash between an aspiring colonial power and a reactive, rural counter-state building movement, led by the Amir Abd al-Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco and the Sanusi leader, Omar al-Mokhtar, in Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. Territorialization was not imposed from the outside by a European colonial power. Rather, it was produced relationally through violent interactions between the colonial state and a local autonomous political entity. This analysis contributes to the still-nascent study of colonial state space and to contemporary policy debates about political order in North Africa and the Middle East by emphasizing the importance of local political mobilization, the complexity of interactions catalyzed across local and translocal scales by colonial expansion, and the high levels of physical violence endemic to the production of territorialized state space.

To explore income inequality in urban China, this paper investigates disparities between- and within-urban locals and rural migrants from 2002 to 2013, using three waves of the China Household Income Project (CHIP) data. While the existing literature concentrates on the wage disparity between these two groups, our results show that the Gini among the migrants increased by 17.86% between 2007 and 2013 and that among the locals increased by 15.54% from 2002 to 2007. The urban–migrant average income gap decreased during the whole period mainly due to higher growth in migrants’ average income. Estimates based on Mincerian earnings functions for both groups reveal the significant role of the education, occupation and type of contract in determining the within-group inequality. In addition, using a recentred influence function (RIF), we observe that short-term and other types of contracts, duration of the job, in-system ownership, marriage and skill have inequality-enhancing effects for migrants. The variation of skills has a larger impact on the income disparity among migrants than on that among urban locals. The RIF-based Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition of the mean difference of incomes shows that labour market discrimination between the two groups is not significant; however, both pure explained and unexplained differences are significant when applying the RIF decomposition to the variance of the logarithms of incomes. While the type of contract significantly reduces the pure explained difference between migrants and urban locals, occupation has a positive impact on this difference between these two groups. The heterogenity analysis shows that the factors influencing incomes in these two groups are different. We recommend labour market intervention to reduce unreasonable occupational and sectoral disparities, especially in the net inflow provinces, to mitigate urban inequality in China effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to show the impact of operational and environmental conditions (risk influencing factors) on the component criticality of safety barriers, safety barrier performance and accidents frequency and therefore on risk levels.

The methodology focuses on the integration of criticality importance analysis in barrier and operational risk analysis method, abbreviated as BORA-CIA. First, the impact of risk influencing factors (RIFs) associated with basic events on safety barrier performance and accident frequency is studied, and then, a risk evaluation is performed. Finally, how unacceptable risks can be mitigated regarding risk criteria is analyzed.

In the proposed approach (BORA-CIA), the authors show how specific installation conditions influence risk levels and analyze the prioritization of components to improve safety barrier performance in oil and gas process.

The proposed methodology seems to be a powerful tool in risk decision. Ordering components of safety barriers taking into account RIFs allow maintenance strategies to be undertaken according to the real environment far from average data. Also, maintenance costs would be estimated adequately.

In this paper, an improved BORA method is developed by incorporating CIA. More precisely, the variability of criticality importance factors of components is used to analyze the prioritization of maintenance actions in an operational environment.

We investigate the reasons why income inequality is so high in Spain in the EU context. We first show that the differential in inequality with Germany and other countries is driven by inequality among households who participate in the labor market. Then, we conduct an analysis of different household income aggregates. We also decompose the inter-country gap in inequality into characteristics and coefficients effects using regressions of the Recentered Influence Function for the Gini index. Our results show that the higher inequality observed in Spain is largely associated with lower employment rates, higher incidence of self-employment, lower attained education, as well as the recent increase in the immigration of economically active households. However, the prevalence of extended families in Spain contributes to reducing inequality by diversifying income sources, with retirement pensions playing an important role. Finally, by comparing the situations in 2008 and 2012, we separate the direct effects of the Great Recession on employment and unemployment benefits, from other more permanent factors (such as the weak redistributive effect of taxes and family or housing allowances, or the roles of education and the extended family).

Social evaluation functions used in policy impact analysis can be viewed as real-valued functionals of the underlying outcome distributions. Influence functions may be used to identify the sources of variation in social outcomes in terms of individual or household characteristics. This chapter sets forth in clear terms the definition of the influence function and recentered influence function, and catalogs these functions for a wide range of distributional statistics, including measures of central tendency, inequality, and poverty and also measures of the degree of pro-poorness of a shock- or policy-induced change in income levels.

Scholars have argued that changes in the U.S. corporate economy in recent decades transformed labor market institutions in revolutionary ways. Although there is a fair amount of evidence in support of these claims, other studies suggest that labor market change in this period was more gradual. This paper synthesizes research from multiple disciplines to assess whether the transformation of two main labor market structures – closed employment relationships associated with internal labor markets (ILMs), and job structures within these ILMs – was revolutionary or evolutionary in recent decades. It then specifies implications of the labor market transformation process for human resource management (HRM), and concludes by suggesting avenues for future research.

To be an effective manager, knowledge of employment laws and how they pertain to terminations, especially mass terminations, is an important attribute. Those selected for termination in a workforce reduction often experience anger, fear, resentment and anxiety. A reduction in force which is carried out in a fair manner and treats the affected individuals with compassion and dignity will go a long way in preventing litigation. The manager must be familiar with how to plan for a reduction in force, the legal aspects involved, and how to go about the actual implementation of the downsizing effort. We have witnessed the workforce downsizing of many organizations within the past few years. The major contributors to this epidemic are plentiful. Economic pressures during the most recent recession and increased global competition have forced organizations to flatten out their organizational structures to enable them to quickly respond to changes in the marketplace. The recent tide of deregulation resulted in mergers and acquisitions creating duplicative positions within the organization. Additionally, the rapid pace of technology has led to databases which displace intermediate level employees whose responsibilities include compiling and analyzing. Unfortunately, corporate reductions may lead to employee lawsuits in the form of “wrongful discharge” cases. Wrongful discharge is a catch‐all phrase for a host of claims made by a former employee against his or her previous employer. The most popular wrongful discharge claims include breach of contract, bad faith, and discrimination of protected groups based on factors such as sex, age, race and many others. Certain employees are covered under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act which requires employers to give 60 days advanced notice in the case of mass terminations. While few of these cases ever make it to court, attorney fees, settlement fees and jury awards can be costly. In California, the average damage award exceeded $600,000. Therefore, a comprehensive evaluation of a reduction in force (“RIF”) plan must be performed and the myriad of legal issues must be considered. During this process, it is important to keep in mind that employees selected for downsizing will experience among other things, fear, anxiety and anger. How the actual implementation of the RIF is carried out will have an immense impact on whether an employee will bring forth a wrongful termination lawsuit.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel model for maintenance backlog (MB) of physical assets and structure it in a framework for integrated planning (IPL).

Reliability theory principles for modelling MB are used. Furthermore, to structure a framework for IPL, literature study combined with earlier case studies is used.

The framework for IPL facilitates the model of MB. In addition to providing real-time diagnosis indicators, MB is regarded as valuable information for decision support in IPL.

Development of MB applied to IPL.

This article aims to advance the state of the art in constructing transformative scenarios by building upon Boudon’s social theory and to reflect its application to research and innovation futures.

The scenarios are based upon a particular multi-level perspective for research and innovation. They are developed around two time horizons: an explorative scenario stage by 2020 (exploring tensions) and a transformative scenario stage by 2030 (tracing the mechanisms of transformation).

Five scenarios provide comprehensive images of research and innovation regimes and practices, how research and innovation is embedded in society by 2030, and what plausible pathways of evolution toward the transformation of our research and innovation landscape may look like.

The methodology “from explorative to transformative scenarios” provides a meaningful, complementary perspective of standard scenario methodology rather than replacing it.

Foresight practitioners can use the methodology to advance the construction of transformative scenarios. The approach from “explorative to transformative scenarios” is best suited when policy measures are to be addressed.

There has been little guidance on how to construct transformative scenarios. Insights from social theory are leveraged to develop a more consolidated approach. The approach of two time horizons, encompassing an explorative and a transformative stage, is novel and applied to research and innovation futures.

Traditional Reduction In Force (RIF) methods have been unpopular, damaging to morale, dysfunctional, probably too expensive and, in some cases, indefensible. The article describes an innovative and democratic solution to RIF decisions. In a steel company a productivity group was instituted to plan the means of managing RIF — fairness to employees being the most important consideration. Participative management appears to be the key to success.