The rationale for South-South trade; An Alternative Approach

Arguing that the theoretical literature on South-South trade is not satisfactory, the author provides an alternative framework and rationale for the South-South trade as a vehicle for industrialization and development of developing countries. He also applies this framework to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, showing that the low-income countries of the region are not benefiting much from the dynamism of the China market for their industrialization, he proposes, inter alia, industrial collaboration among the low-income countries as a necessary condition for benefiting from the potential role of China as a “pole” of industrialization and development of the countries of the region.International trade, South-South cooperation, industrial collaboration, production sharing, East Asia

Interacting cells driving the evolution of multicellular life cycles

Author summary Multicellular organisms are ubiquitous. But how did the first multicellular organisms arise? It is typically argued that this occurred due to benefits coming from interactions between cells. One example of such interactions is the division of labour. For instance, colonial cyanobacteria delegate photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation to different cells within the colony. In this way, the colony gains a growth advantage over unicellular cyanobacteria. However, not all cell interactions favour multicellular life. Cheater cells residing in a colony without any contribution will outgrow other cells. Then, the growing burden of cheaters may eventually destroy the colony. Here, we ask what kinds of interactions promote the evolution of multicellularity? We investigated all interactions captured by pairwise games and for each of them, we look for the evolutionarily optimal life cycle: How big should the colony grow and how should it split into offspring cells or colonies? We found that multicellularity can evolve with interactions far beyond cooperation or division of labour scenarios. More surprisingly, most of the life cycles found fall into either of two categories: A parent colony splits into two multicellular parts, or it splits into multiple independent cells

The implications of the concept of exaptation for a theory of economic change

The term exaptation, coined by Gould and Vrba, refers to those characters that are useful for survival but that were not selected for this purpose. In this paper I will focus on the notion of exaptation in socio economic systems and on its implications for a theory of economic change. In socio-economic systems, an exaptation is the result of a process through which the initial attribution of new functionalities to existing socio-economic entities (agents, artifacts, social institutions) leads to new entities and new relationships between entities. The notion of exaptation forces to examine the processes of change in socio-economic systems in terms of an interaction-based ontology that I will provide, following the complexity theory of innovation. I will use this ontology to highlight how processes of economic change can be analysed in terms of emergent phenomena and in particular in terms of the emergence of new specific functionalities and qualitatively new entities and relationships. I will refer these processes to the relationships between agent and artifacts, and to the organization of the economy and society. This second type of process of emergence will be examined with reference to the changing characteristics and functions of the division of labour emerging from the historical processes of interaction between quantitative and qualitative changes of production relations. I will conclude that economic change cannot be analysed in terms of a mere recombination of existing things or in terms of selection-variation mechanisms. It must be analysed through the dynamic historical process by which “a new thing leads to another”. In these processes of transformation the causality links are themselves the results of processes in which ex ante potential causality links can be transformed into different (and new) effective (or actual) causality links

The activity of entrepreneurial leadership

Our knowledge of entrepreneurial leadership has advanced considerably, but research gaps persist. Namely, existing research has prioritized a focus on the individual, neglecting to consider how context may inform our understanding of entrepreneurial leadership. Particularly, we lack knowledge about how ownership can influence the form of social relations within Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), in terms of leadership or otherwise. Informed empirically by qualitative research with SME organizational members and theoretically by the notion of ‘activity’, this study addresses these gaps in the literature for entrepreneurial leadership and makes four contributions to this body of work. First, this study contributes a theoretical frame for studying entrepreneurial leadership as an ‘activity’ that is object-driven, mediated by social relations and tools, and contextualized within the capitalist labour process. I argue that this frame is a contribution as it allows us to account for ownership and its relational implications, understand and problematize the social relations between individuals in SME contexts, and understand the form of power relations between individuals in those contexts. Second, the study problematizes arguments in the literature that entrepreneurial leadership by an individual results in organization growth. Instead, it is argued that organization growth is the ‘object’ of the activity of entrepreneurial leadership, but a product of human labour that is fetishized in production. Third, the study problematizes the significance of transformational leadership for understanding entrepreneurial leadership. Specifically, it is argued that transformational leadership may be relevant for understanding the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, but in the context of owner-managed SMEs, it potentially conceals and contradicts an underlying reality constituted by the capitalist-worker social relation, one that is characterized by exchange, exploitation, domination and struggle. Lastly, this study offers a methodological contribution for how ‘context’ can be operationalized and explored in research for entrepreneurial leadership, in ways that may overcome the ‘heroic’ lustre imbued within existing understandings of it

The rationale for South-South trade; An Alternative Approach

Arguing that the theoretical literature on South-South trade is not satisfactory, the author provides an alternative framework and rationale for the South-South trade as a vehicle for industrialization and development of developing countries. He also applies this framework to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, showing that the low-income countries of the region are not benefiting much from the dynamism of the China market for their industrialization, he proposes, inter alia, industrial collaboration among the low-income countries as a necessary condition for benefiting from the potential role of China as a “pole” of industrialization and development of the countries of the region

The rationale for South-South trade; An Alternative Approach

Arguing that the theoretical literature on South-South trade is not satisfactory, the author provides an alternative framework and rationale for the South-South trade as a vehicle for industrialization and development of developing countries. He also applies this framework to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, showing that the low-income countries of the region are not benefiting much from the dynamism of the China market for their industrialization, he proposes, inter alia, industrial collaboration among the low-income countries as a necessary condition for benefiting from the potential role of China as a “pole” of industrialization and development of the countries of the region

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp