An anthropological investigation of urban land development : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of M.A. in Social Anthropology at Massey University

The impetus for this project came from examples of neighbours' disempowerment in the land and property development process. There is a growing academic consensus that dominant approaches to land development fail to adequately address this issue. NeoMarxist approaches focus on conflict, power, and exploitation, but effectively eliminate the role of the actual developer in exercising power. Case study approaches, on the other hand, have been concerned with conflict and disempowerment, but have focused on specific instances of neighbourhood opposition and resistance. Explanation is often confined to local and national features of the social and geographical environment. These inadequacies pointed to the need to investigate the increasingly significant role that professional, entrepreneurial developers play at the nexus of the contemporary development process. An ethnographic methodology was used to provide a richer understanding of the land and property development process. The principal participants in the study are a set of 'entrepreneurial developers' operating in and around Palmerston North. Interviews, participant observation, and the examination of case studies are employed. This is complemented by an investigation of the Regulatory Procedure, including interviews with Council Officers, and examination of Council case studies. The research also uses interviews with neighbours, and a wide body of material published within the development industry. Planning for the study drew on Giddens' 'Theory of Structuration' (1979,1984) which stresses the interrelationship between the social structures of the development process, and the agency of developers. The research sought to elucidate the dominant forms of action and ideology which development agents acknowledge, and which therefore constitute the action and ideology of the development industry. The interpretation of the empirical data uses three interrelated perspectives: The first, provides a broad, industry-level, perspective on the local development industry. It asks, 'What are the major influences which shape and structure the contemporary development industry?'; The second, examines the level of action. It asks 'What are the actions of most significance to developers?', and 'What forms of conduct constitute the Institutional structures of the Regulatory Procedure?'; The third focuses on ideology. It asks, 'What are the dominant motivations which direct and influence developers' conduct?', and 'How do developers legitimate and rationalise conduct?'. An interesting aspect to the thesis is the extent to which developers share patterns of ideology, not only with each other, but also with a wider business community. Much of this characteristic ideology parallels findings in other ethnographic studies of capitalistic systems. The research highlights the fact that ethnography, and the notion of 'culture', provide an insightful and useful perspective of both the business world, and the study of development

Error-related scalp potentials elicited by hand and foot movements : evidence for an output-independent error-processing system in humans

The error-related negativity (ERN) is a fronto-centrally distributed component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) that occurs when human subjects make errors in a variety of experimental tasks. In the present study, we recorded ERPs from 128 scalp electrodes while subjects performed a choice reaction time task using either their hands or feet. We applied the brain electric source analysis technique to compare ERNs elicited by hand and foot errors. The scalp distributions of these error potentials suggest that they share the same neural generator and, therefore, that the ERN process is output-independent. Together with other findings, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that the ERN is generated within the anterior cingulate cortex and is elicited by the activation of a generic error-processing system. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd

Structural Models and Endogeneity in Corporate Finance: the Link Between Managerial Ownership and Corporate Performance

This paper presents a parsimonious, structural model that captures primary economic determinants of the relation between firm value and managerial ownership. Supposing that observed firm size and managerial pay-performance sensitivity (PPS) maximize value, we invert our model to panel data on size and PPS to obtain estimates of the productivity of physical assets and managerial input. Variation of these productivity parameters, optimizing firm size and compensation contract, and the way the parameters and choices interact in the model, all combine to deliver the well-known hump-shaped relation between Tobin’s Q and managerial ownership (e.g., McConnell and Servaes (1990)). Our structural approach illustrates how a quantitative model of the firm can isolate important aspects of organization structure, quantify the economic significance of incentive mechanisms, and minimize the endogeneity and causation problems that so commonly plague empirical corporate finance. Doing so appears to be essential because, by simulating panel data from the model and applying standard statistical tools, we confirm that the customary econometric remedies for endogeneity and causation can be ineffective in application.

Decision-making in blackjack : an electrophysiological analysis

Previous studies have identified a negative potential in the event-related potential (ERP), the error-related negativity (ERN), which is claimed to be triggered by a deviation from a reward expectation. Furthermore, this negativity is related to shifts in risk taking, strategic behavioral adjustments, and inhibition. We used a computer Blackjack gambling task to further examine the process associated with the ERN. Our findings are in line with the view that the ERN process is related to the degree of reward expectation. Furthermore, increased ERN amplitude is associated with the negative evaluation of ongoing decisions, and the amplitude of the ERN is directly related to risk-taking and decision-making behavior. However, the findings suggest that an explanation exclusively based on the deviation from a reward expectation may be insufficient and that the intention of the participants and the importance of a negative event for learning and behavioral change are crucial to the understanding of ERN phenomena