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Our purpose is to examine the “envy” within the context of income inequality measurement.

We use a simple axiomatic structure that takes into account “envy” in the income distribution. The concept of envy incorporated here concerns the distance of each person's income from his or her immediately richer neighbour.

We derive two classes of inequality indices – absolute and relative. The envy concept is shown to be similar to justice concepts based on income relativities.

This is the first time a complete characterisation has been provided for envy-related inequality.

This chapter posits that we underestimate the way in which our immersion in the ‘social logic’ of capitalist consumption constrains our attempts to understand and respond to the ecological crises at both a personal and political level – and that both dimensions of our response are bound together.

Survey of literature on psychology, well-being and mindfulness.

How has the culture of capitalism – its psychic investment in colonizing our attention – compromised our ability to respond meaningfully to the challenges of sustainable development? In an acknowledgement of a certain closure around such themes within Western thought, I look to a point of exteriority in Peter Hershock’s work, drawing on China’s Chan Buddhist philosophy, for intimations of a worldview that challenges the West’s over-commitment to forms of ‘control’ in favour of a cultivation of mindful and careful awareness – and an offering of unconditional attention.

Draws attention to a new phase of ‘enclosure’ in the cultural processes of capitalism.

Original introduction of a critical approach to mindfulness in the debate on well-being.

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g., the mean or the median), the amalgam poverty line becomes a weighted average of the absolute poverty line and the reference income, where the weights depend on the policy maker’s preferences for aggregating the two components. The paper ends with an empirical illustration comparing urban and rural areas in the People’s Republic of China and India.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the transfer of a concept issued in one culture to a different setting, featuring different characteristics from the one in which the concept appeared.

Secondary data have been collected by analysing accounting regulations issued after the fall of communism with respect to true and fair view (TFV). Primary data have been collected by conducting eleven semi-structured interviews with representatives of major actors involved in the process of financial reporting. We have further developed and tested two research propositions.

We find that the perception of TFV in Romania depends firstly on the category of actors. Second, we find that merely including a rule or a concept in the regulations of a certain setting does not automatically mean that they will be applied de facto consistently with their original meaning, issued from a different setting.

We conclude that concept intertranslatability cannot be assumed under the circumstances investigated in our chapter, with immediate implications for other cases presupposing that concept transfer works, such as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The small number of interviews we have conducted may be viewed as a limitation of our study; however, special care was exercised when choosing interviewees, and they are key persons within their organizations, or representative of all the interested parties in the process of financial reporting in Romania.

We contribute to an increasing literature on accounting harmonization and applicability of global standards and concepts in local contexts.

This article explores aspects of separation from “post-traditional” religiosity characteristic of certain late/post-modern affiliations. To do so, I analyze in-depth interviews with 44 individuals who formerly identified with straightedge – a clean-living youth-oriented scene tightly bound with hardcore music that is centered on abstinence from intoxicants – about their experiences transitioning through associated music assembly rituals. While features of hardcore music assemblies – e.g. moshing, slamdancing, sing-a-longs – have long been treated as symbolic connections that potentially conjure the religious as conceptualized in Émile Durkheim's “effervescence” and the liminality of Victor Turner's “communitas,” data on transitions from these features of ritual remain scant. Ex-straightedgers generally believed the sorts of deep connections they professed to experience in hardcore rituals as youths were not necessarily currently accessible to them, nor were they replicable elsewhere. Findings then ultimately suggest some post-traditional religious experiences might now be profitably considered in terms of the life course, which has itself transformed alongside the proliferation of newer late/post-modern affiliations and communities.

As Hirschman wrote of himself in an essay of 1984, he was a dissenter. The paper focuses on three dimensions of this dissent. Dissent from orthodoxy, in the first place, even if his stance rarely assumed the feature of a frontal opposition. His distance from mainstream economics clearly emerges in the contrast between growth and development, here exemplified through a comparison of Solow’s and Hirschman’s conceptions. Second, dissent from heterodoxy: from Nurkse, Rosenstein Rodan and the balanced growth theory, but also a distance from the kind of economic theorizing recently exemplified by Krugman’s critical appraisal of Hirschman’s contribution. Third, a dissent from Hirschman himself. He developed a practice defined as “self-subversion” to convey the meaning of a self-critical dialogue with his own positions. In this context, two examples will be discussed, namely his critical reappraisal of the dependency theory, to which Hirschman as a young man contributed indirectly, and his after-thoughts on the choice between sequential or simultaneous strategies. Hirschman’s reflections on the last theme appear relevant to address the problems of current Eurozone crisis: its roots may be traced back to the faulty construction of the Monetary Union, which in turn largely stemmed from the misplaced confidence in the “automatism” of the sequence Monetary Union-Fiscal Union-Political Union.

The paper’s contention is that Hirschman’s “possibilism,” often mentioned, is not the result of a generic psychological propensity to optimism but stems from analytical observations and penetrating critical analysis of received ideas or categories, of other authors or of Hirschman himself.

To conclude this book, we take stock of the state of the field of clean language interviewing (CLI). The field has matured considerably in 20 years and yet is still young and emergent. Through articulating the principles of CLI and exploring its application in many fields of practice, we hope this book might come to be seen as a milestone on its path. From its informal beginnings and earliest applications, we believe we can claim with justification that clean language interviewing has developed into a well-specified, well-tested and well-appreciated method that can be used to access both explicitly- and tacitly-held knowledge in a wide range of research projects.

As editors of this volume, we have been gratified and humbled by the ways in which CLI has been used by the contributors. Part II has demonstrated the value of clean language interviewing in both academic and applied research. The applications presented illustrate that CLI has breadth – given the diverse fields in which it has been applied – as well as depth, due to the various levels at which it can be used.

Our aim in this chapter is to reflect on themes that have emerged from the contributions in Part II and the experience of compiling the book as a whole. We begin by reviewing the frameworks that we regard as essential to CLI, then discuss three issues of practice and theory that have emerged from Part II. We sum up the key benefits and limitations of CLI for interviewers and interviewees before indicating some possible directions for future research.