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Schonhardt-Bailey's goal is to explain the repeal of the Corn Laws. This case is of obvious substantive importance. Schonhardt-Bailey also identifies a good historical puzzle in the details of trying to explain legislative voting behavior on Repeal. First, politicians seemed to act against their personal economic and political interests when voting for it. Second, they also acted in a puzzling way when justifying their own behavior. Specifically, Schonhardt-Bailey shows that the politicians voted as delegates of their constituents. Intriguingly, these same politicians justified their votes in terms of a trustee theory of representation in which they acted on behalf of the nation in accordance with their personal best judgment. These votes, though not the justifications, would seem to violate the mandates on which many had been elected, since most had personal mandates and were not sent to the Commons as delegates.

National parks are selected as places of national importance, with national meaning. At the same time, the political process that shapes park management is often a local one. This biases park interpretation away from national concerns and toward local ones. The National Park Service's corporate interests and decision-making processes often reinforce the role of local interests except in the rare cases of congressional intervention. A close look at the political environment of Fort Davis National Historic Site, Texas, illustrates these points. Congress mandated the site to interpret westward expansion and its impact on American Indians. It became instead a program of park interpretation based on westward expansion and the role of African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” within it. As a result, Indians have effectively been written out of the story of this “Indian fort.” Interestingly, Native American issues reappear in commercial establishments, both the gift shop in the park and businesses in the town of Fort Davis outside the park. If businesses perceive a demand for information about Native Americans among tourists, presumably there is a similar, unmet demand among the same tourists as they visit the historic site. Given the role of local concerns in park interpretation, national intervention will probably be necessary to provide political support for reinterpreting the site.

This is an attempt to outline a sociological, and in particular a theoretical response to the challenge of European integration and its associated socio‐spatial restructuring.

This paper analyses French and US universities’ organizational responses to the more or less explicit pressures they face to go interdisciplinary. Defining universities as pluralistic organizations, I show that the implementation of interdisciplinary research does not result in well-integrated institutional strategies, but rather combines initiatives from the scientific community and from university leaders. Based on case studies conducted on the development of interdisciplinary nanomedicine in five leading French and US research universities, I identify three settings where the implementation of interdisciplinarity involves shifts in organizational structure – in principal investigator-based research teams and scientific networks, in departmental boundaries, and in institutional structures, and question issues of governance, leadership and resource allocation arising from those shifts. We see similarities between the two countries in terms of how initiatives by “entrepreneurial academics” – searching for funds for interdisciplinary research – and by the university leadership – also searching for funds, and redefining institutional projects around interdisciplinarity – complement each other. We also identify one major difference – with French pro-interdisciplinary university policies being strongly influenced by a political impetus from the French ministry of higher education and research.

Cooperative strategies, both domestic and foreign, have become an important component of the strategic repertoire of firms. Various forms of interfirm alliances are redefining and transforming the very nature of competition. Considering their importance, a solid understanding of their fundamental dynamics is necessary. Different forms of alliances exist: from those that emerge because partners have some preexisting advantages such as geographic proximity or shared history to those that arise because third parties such as governments have created the enabling environment. Looking at the context and operational dynamics of various alliance configurations may help our understanding of how to manage them. This paper presents four configurations or clusters of alliances based on their origins and link the context to operational dynamics. The policy and research implications of the paper are also presented.

Using bibliometrics to examine eight core journals in the year 2000 for the disciplines of higher education and library science, characteristics of the authors were determined, including gender or sex; Carnegie Classification or institutional affiliation; and position of the authors. Characteristics of the articles were also examined, including the research methods used such as descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, or qualitative analysis. A content analysis of each article was performed to determine the subjects discussed in each literature. For both disciplines, it was learned that males publish more, the highest Carnegie Classification, extensive research institutions, were represented the most, and authors came from academic departments other than their own disciplines. In higher education, inferential statistics were used frequently; in library and information descriptive statistics were used frequently; both disciplines failed to use research methodologies regularly. From these findings, it appears that both disciplines are still emerging and are in their early stages of development.