Nematodos edáficos y de agua dulce de la fauna ibérica: una síntesis

The first available compilation of Iberian soil and freshwater nematodes is presented in this paper. The inventory is currently made up of 981 species belonging to 236 genera, 77 families and 12 orders. Data of the Iberian nematode fauna are compared with other components of the Iberian biota, as well as the nematode fauna of other geographical regions. Quantitative and qualitative aspects of the nematode inventory are analyzed and discussed, paying special attention to the kind of information available for each species, and concluding that practically one-third of Iberian species are deficiently characterized and need further study. Endemicity of Iberian species is also considered: 143 species, 14.6% of the total, are restricted (in their distribution) to the Iberian geography, most of them being members of the orders Dorylaimida (87) and Tylenchida (29), which are also the most diversified nematode taxa. Practical or applied interest of knowledge of the Iberian nematode fauna is commented and supported with examples and recent contributions. Finally, an alphabetical list of the species, ordered by specific name, is provided.En esta contribución se presenta una recopilación de las especies ibéricas de nematodos de suelo y de agua dulce, la primera de este tipo realizada hasta el momento. El inventario actual lo componen 981 especies de 236 géneros, 77 familias y 12 órdenes. Los datos correspondiente a la fauna ibérica de nematodos se compara con la de otros táxones de la biota ibérica. Se analizan y se discuten distintos aspectos cuantitativos y cualitativos de la fauna nematológica, con especial énfasis en el tipo de información disponible sobre cada especie, y se concluye que casi una tercera parte de las especies ibéricas permanecen insuficientemente caracterizadas, razón por la cual requieren de estudios adicionales. La endemicidad de las especies es así mismo objeto de atención: 143 especies, un 14.6% del total están restringidas en su distribución al ámbito ibérico, en su mayor parte pertenecientes a los órdenes Dorylaimida (87) y Tylenchida (29), por otra parte los más diversificados de entre los pertenecientes al filo. El interés básico y aplicado del conocimiento de la fauna de nematodos es comentado e ilustrado con aportaciones recientes y ejemplos. Por último, se presenta una lista de todas las especies de la fauna ibérica, ordenadas alfabéticamente por su epíteto específico

Investigating the potentially contradictory microfoundations of financialization

The existing academic literature on financialization points to multiple instances in which firms attempt to demonstrate the vitality of their stock-market position in ways which ultimately prove to be self-harming. I demonstrate, in the first instance as a matt er of immanent logic, that these actions are linked to the interplay of contradictory tendencies in the microfoundations of financialization. Under conditions of financialization, firms create additional sources of credit to capitalize their productive activities by driving their stock price into greater increases than the market average, thereby generating capital gains. Yet, the more it becomes public knowledge that the financing tricks used to inflate the stock price provide no productive benefit to the firm, the more it would seem to create incentives for fund managers to hold portfolios that replicate the stock market as a whole. In this way, they will minimize their exposure to financial misrepresentation. Such a stance undermines financialized business models, but it does in any case conform to fund managers' basic theoretical training, which revolves around the logical demonstration that an individual stock cannot systematically out-perform the market average. I review the available empirical studies of fund manager decision-making to show that they find against the existence of a simple performativity loop operating between finance theory and fund manager behaviour. However, on many points the empirical evidence does confirm the theoretically derived conclusion concerning the potentially contradictory microfoundations of financialization. Fund managers often do act in a way which is consistent with finance theory's core claim that an index-tracking strategy represents the only equilibrium portfolio, even if this is only rarely as a result of the direct performativity of the theory

Distinguishing Financialization from Neoliberalism

This article contends that neoliberalism and financialization, although sharing much in common, are not synonymous developments. Not only do strongly financialized nations display structural, economic differences, they are also directed by alternative economic epistemologies, cultures and practices. The argument is made by examining the financialization of the UK economy since the mid-1970s. This shift was not simply part of a broad transition away from Keynesianism and towards free market fundamentalism. It was also one very much guided by the particular economic paradigm, discursive practices and devices of the City of London as financial elites took up influential positions in the Thatcher government. The discussion and case example highlight five epistemological elements specific to finance: the creation of money in financial markets, the transactional focus of finance, the centrality of financial markets to economic management, the orthodoxy of shareholder value, and the intense microeconomic approach to financial calculation. Such elements, in conjuction with neoliberalism’s reliance upon finance-blind neoclassical economics, lies at the cultural and epistemological distinction between fiancialization and neoliberalism. Identifying such distinctions opens up new possibilities for understanding financialization, elites, and the neoliberal condition that brought about the financial crash of 2007-08, as well as the political and economic crises that have followed

The multiplicity of performance management systems:Heterogeneity in multinational corporations and management sense-making

This field study examines the workings of multiple performance measurement systems (PMSs) used within and between a division and Headquarters (HQ) of a large European corporation. We explore how multiple PMSs arose within the multinational corporation. We first provide a first‐order analysis which explains how managers make sense of the multiplicity and show how an organization's PMSs may be subject to competing processes for control that result in varied systems, all seemingly functioning, but with different rationales and effects. We then provide a second‐order analysis based on a sense‐making perspective that highlights the importance of retrospective understandings of the organization's history and the importance of various legitimacy expectations to different parts of the multinational. Finally, we emphasize the role of social skill in sense‐making that enables the persistence of multiple systems and the absence of overt tensions and conflict within organizations

Finance as ‘bizarre bazaar’: using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge

Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive, and increasingly placeless – precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this paper we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geertz’s work on the bazaar by taking an indire ct route to access the field site – Collateral Debt Obligations – through documents. In reading these documents, we assume the position of investors who, in the absence of alternative publicly available information, are dependent on the documentary accounts made available to them by the sellers. These media act in ways that are similar to tourist guidebooks, a comparison we use to reframe the exchange as one that builds upon sociocultural relations rather than the abstract market relationships described by m ainstream economists. We propose that these documents are not merely representational artefacts of the organisation, but serve to establish and maintain social relationships between buyers and sellers through the management, standardisation and ritualisati on of information disclosed to the investor

How expectations became governable: institutional change and the performative power of central banks

Central banks have accumulated unparalleled power over the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Key for this development was the articulation and differentiation of monetary policy as a distinct policy domain. While political economists emphasize the foundational institutional changes that enabled this development, recent performativity-studies focus on central bankers’ invention of expectation management techniques. In line with a few other works, this article aims to bring these two aspects together. The key argument is that, over the last few decades, central banks have identified different strategies to assume authority over “expectational politics” and reinforced dominant institutional forces within them. I introduce a comparative scheme to distinguish two different expectational governance regimes. My own empirical investigation focuses on a monetarist regime that emerged from corporatist contexts, where central banks enjoyed “embedded autonomy” and where commercial banks maintained conservative reserve management routines. I further argue that innovations towards inflation targeting took place in countries with non-existent or disintegrating corporatist structures and where central banks turned to finance to establish a different version of expectation coordination. A widespread adoption of this “financialized” expectational governance has been made possible by broader processes of institutional convergence that were supported by central bankers themselves

The anthropology of money and finance : between ethnography and world history

We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings and prospects, while referring back to the discipline‘s founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. From the 1980s the anthropological study of money and ethnographies of finance especially have taken off. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money in shaping world society and in attempts to reform it.http://www.annualreviews.org/hb201