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This chapter contributes to drawing Melanesian ethnography out of the exoticizing interest for gift exchange and demand-sharing. Furthermore, it provides an analytical perspective from which it is possible to conceptualize the manipulation of gift and commodity logics as mutually compatible frameworks. Rather than seeing them as contradictory, this perspective enables the theorization of shared calculative agencies that are becoming increasingly common in contemporary Melanesia.

The chapter draws on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Gilbert Camp, a peri-urban settlement on the outskirts of Honiara, Solomon Islands with a focus on the domestic moral economy of its inhabitants.

The people of Gilbert Camp are confronting a difficult economic and moral dilemma. On the one hand, they are at constant risk of financial failure because of their general conditions of scarcity. On the other, they face the prospect of disrupting some of their much-valued social relationships because such scarcity prevents them from fulfilling their cultural obligations. In order to avoid both risks, they make use of their financial competence and cultural creativity to set up strategies that save them money and preserve these relationships. Situated at the interface between kinship and market values, these strategies contribute to achieving the kind of ‘good’ life that they see as the correct balance between financial prosperity and morality.

Current negotiations over the meaning of buying, selling and taking are changing the values of contemporary sociality in Honiara, Port Vila, and other Melanesian cities. Tradestores simultaneously supply households with food and money, create a sense of sharing, and limit the demand-sharing and the taking of wantoks. Hence they create the conditions for the resolution of tensions over the incompatibility of values of kinship and market that confront the inhabitants of Melanesian cities. Household tradestores thus constitute a major site of these negotiations, and they provide a unique vantage point from which to look at the moral and economic processes that are leading to the future identity of urban Melanesia.

This essay aims at retracing the intellectual and biographical events of the economist Gino Arias (1879–1940), examining more in detail the two seasons at the opposite ends of his life: the early one that saw him considerably committed to the Zionist cause and the one that, thirty years later, would force him to confront the racial laws of the Fascist regime.

Despite the seeming tragic continuity of these two phases, Arias’s case is a real historiographical paradox since, over the long span between the opposite ends of his biography, not only did he distance himself from the Zionist movement, but he also gradually laid the foundations for his upcoming and immediate dedication to Fascism; indeed, within the Fascist regime he would stand out as an authoritative and influential theorist of corporatism, the institutional solution Mussolini tried to exploit to organize the national economic life.

After carefully examining Arias’s early contributions to the Zionist cause (that include the establishment of the Florentine Zionist Group and that led him toward strongly nationalistic stances), this essay sums up Arias’s intellectual biography during the next years and then, thanks to unprecedented documents from the Italian Ministry of Interior, closely looks into his fate after his conversion to Catholicism in 1932 and up against the racial laws of 1938, as well as into his attempts to escape persecution. A few final observations will then try to highlight the dramatic exemplarity of his case.

The interaction of consumers and technology has become a challenge for companies and marketing professionals. Technological acceleration has transformed how business is conducted and the consumer-company relationship. The need to establish communication with (potential) consumers to promote engagement with the brand highlights the importance of using mobile instant messaging (MIM). In this context, this paper aims to investigate the use of MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers.

This article investigates, through a systematic literature review (SLR), the state of the art of scientific research regarding the use of MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers. To analyze the selected articles, the authors used a research protocol composed of three stages: (1) planning, (2) conducting and (3) disseminating knowledge.

This study made four main contributions to the MIM field: (1) extends the literature on MIM, focusing on the perspective of companies and consumers; (2) expands the ongoing discussions, suggesting the limited availability of research on MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers; (3) development of a typology composed of three classes, namely “Consumer relationship,” “Social interaction and technology, and “Social media as channels strategy”; (4) the fourth contribution concerns identifying future research areas and answering questions.

This article is the first to investigate, through a SLR, the state of the art of scientific research regarding the use of MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers.

This study investigates whether and how place-based industrial relocation policy affects firm innovation.

By exploiting the establishment of China's National Industrial Relocation Demonstration Zones (NIRDZs) as a quasi-natural experiment in a difference-in-differences design, the authors examine the externalities of industrial policies that support sustainable development and growth from the perspectives of firms' patenting activities.

The study consistently finds that the NIRDZs policy significantly boosts local firm innovation, translating into a 60.46% increase in the patent applications of treated firms. The estimation results remain robust to a series of alternative specifications. Moreover, heterogeneity analysis suggests that the firms that benefited most were state-owned enterprises, firms with higher productivity, or firms in non-high-tech industries. Further, the authors find that the NIRDZs policy stimulates firm innovation mainly in the form of utility model patents, followed by designs and invention patents.

The results provide suggestions and implications for policymakers to improve the efficiency of state-led industrial policies and avoid “government failure” in policy implementation.

This study provides suggestions and implications for policymakers to improve the efficiency of state-led industrial policies and avoid “government failure” in the policy implementation.

This study fills the research gap by exploiting quasi-experiments to assess the effectiveness of state-led industrial policies for emerging economies. (2) The analysis sheds empirical light on how corporate innovation is motivated and financed by selective and functional industrial policies. (3) Theoretically, the results rationalize why state-led industrial relocation fuel innovation capabilities of localities from Marshall externalities and competition crowding-out effects.