Inventing the Economy Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GDP.

What is the economy? Recent scholarship has demonstrated that “the economy” is a relatively new feature of economic discourse. Before 1930, economists theorized and measured markets, trade, inequality, and more, but did not bundle these objects together into a unified whole named “the economy.” This dissertation offers a “formation story” for the economy, tracing the messy assemblages that constituted the economy and the consequences that flowed from the particular shape it took. Using a variety of historical data, I argue that the production of official, routine, timely macroeconomic statistics transformed the fuzzy conceptual space of “economic life” into a sociotechnical object, “the economy” in the 1930s and 1940s. I focus especially on national income statistics (GNP, GDP) as a key practice that enacted the economy as an object with a precisely-defined boundary and size. This dissertation contributes to research on the performativity of economics and the political power of economic expertise. I show how economists constructed “regimes of perceptibility” that focused attention on economic growth, and away from income and wealth inequality, which contributed to academics and policymakers overlooking increasing inequality. Similarly, macroeconomic statistics ignored unpaid housework, and thus defined much of women’s labor outside of the economy. The macroeconomic regime of perceptibility made visible small economic fluctuations that were invisible in earlier eras. This visibility made possible a new political rationality, “managing the economy,” which allowed policymakers to act on economic aggregates rather than individual industries or markets, while simultaneously obligating them to account for small deviations from precisely defined goals. Economic experts thus reshaped political dynamics by constructing new objects of governance and, in so doing, reshaping the capacities and obligations of the state.PHDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120713/1/dandanar_1.pd

\u3cem\u3eThe Modern Corporation\u3c/em\u3e as Social Construction

Classic works, Mark Mizruchi and Lisa Fein argued, share a particular fate. Authors often cite classic works without reading them—or without reading them carefully. . . . Yet perhaps no single work fits the above description better than one of the most important books on the large corporation ever published: Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. One can speculate that few works in the social sciences have been as often cited and as little read. As a consequence, we would expect The Modern Corporation to be a good candidate for either selective interpretation or outright misinterpretation. And as we shall demonstrate, the book did indeed receive such treatment. . . . First, we present what we see as Berle and Means’s primary contributions in The Modern Corporation. Second, we describe various interpretations of this classic and situate these interpretations in their historical contexts. Third, we discuss the extent to which these interpretations provided an accurate account of the state of the American corporation and American business in the post-World War II period. We argue that these interpretations can be reconciled when we take into account the countervailing forces of the state, labor, and the financial community that created the conditions for a moderate, pragmatic approach to corporate governance. Finally, we discuss the changes that have occurred since the postwar period, from the 1970s on, and assess the fate of The Modern Corporation in light of those changes

\u3cem\u3eThe Modern Corporation\u3c/em\u3e as Social Construction

Classic works, Mark Mizruchi and Lisa Fein argued, share a particular fate. Authors often cite classic works without reading them—or without reading them carefully. . . . Yet perhaps no single work fits the above description better than one of the most important books on the large corporation ever published: Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. One can speculate that few works in the social sciences have been as often cited and as little read. As a consequence, we would expect The Modern Corporation to be a good candidate for either selective interpretation or outright misinterpretation. And as we shall demonstrate, the book did indeed receive such treatment. . . . First, we present what we see as Berle and Means’s primary contributions in The Modern Corporation. Second, we describe various interpretations of this classic and situate these interpretations in their historical contexts. Third, we discuss the extent to which these interpretations provided an accurate account of the state of the American corporation and American business in the post-World War II period. We argue that these interpretations can be reconciled when we take into account the countervailing forces of the state, labor, and the financial community that created the conditions for a moderate, pragmatic approach to corporate governance. Finally, we discuss the changes that have occurred since the postwar period, from the 1970s on, and assess the fate of The Modern Corporation in light of those changes

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And Rick Searle looks at “micro-democracy” and the politics of Information in the recent Centenal Cycle books by sci-fi author (and trained sociologist!) Malka Older to find possibilities for alternative political futures

On reminder effects, drop-outs and dominance: evidence from an online experiment on charitable giving

We present the results of an experiment that (a) shows the usefulness of screening out drop-outs and (b) tests whether different methods of payment and reminder intervals affect charitable giving. Following a lab session, participants could make online donations to charity for a total duration of three months. Our procedure justifying the exclusion of drop-outs consists in requiring participants to collect payments in person flexibly and as known in advance and as highlighted to them later. Our interpretation is that participants who failed to collect their positive payments under these circumstances are likely not to satisfy dominance. If we restrict the sample to subjects who did not drop out, but not otherwise, reminders significantly increase the overall amount of charitable giving. We also find that weekly reminders are no more effective than monthly reminders in increasing charitable giving, and that, in our three months duration experiment, standing orders do not increase giving relative to one-off donations

Instances and connectors : issues for a second generation process language

This work is supported by UK EPSRC grants GR/L34433 and GR/L32699Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined, used and evaluated. It is now possible to consider second generation languages based on this experience. Rather than develop a second generation wish list this position paper explores two issues: instances and connectors. Instances relate to the relationship between a process model as a description and the, possibly multiple, enacting instances which are created from it. Connectors refers to the issue of concurrency control and achieving a higher level of abstraction in how parts of a model interact. We believe that these issues are key to developing systems which can effectively support business processes, and that they have not received sufficient attention within the process modelling community. Through exploring these issues we also illustrate our approach to designing a second generation process language.Postprin

@Note: a workbench for biomedical text mining

Biomedical Text Mining (BioTM) is providing valuable approaches to the automated curation of scientific literature. However, most efforts have addressed the benchmarking of new algorithms rather than user operational needs. Bridging the gap between BioTM researchers and biologists’ needs is crucial to solve real-world problems and promote further research. We present @Note, a platform for BioTM that aims at the effective translation of the advances between three distinct classes of users: biologists, text miners and software developers. Its main functional contributions are the ability to process abstracts and full-texts; an information retrieval module enabling PubMed search and journal crawling; a pre-processing module with PDF-to-text conversion, tokenisation and stopword removal; a semantic annotation schema; a lexicon-based annotator; a user-friendly annotation view that allows to correct annotations and a Text Mining Module supporting dataset preparation and algorithm evaluation. @Note improves the interoperability, modularity and flexibility when integrating in-home and open-source third-party components. Its component-based architecture allows the rapid development of new applications, emphasizing the principles of transparency and simplicity of use. Although it is still on-going, it has already allowed the development of applications that are currently being used.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Obligaciones de justicia: ¿<i>open borders</i> o justicia Distributiva?

This paper criticizes traditional positions about the discretional competence of states regarding the access of immigrants, and asks whether the right for free mobility or obligations of global distributive justice follows from the standpoint of global justice. According to the argument, much seems to speak in favor of global distributive justice if global justice is exclusively concerned about inequality of opportunity and poverty. However, even if this is the case significant restrictions on state discretional competence regarding immigration issues should be recognized.<br><br>En este artículo se critican aquellas posiciones que defienden la discrecionalidad de los Estados en relación al acceso de inmigrantes en el territorio de su soberanía y se investiga si desde la perspectiva de la justicia global se desprende un derecho a la movilidad libre y/o obligaciones de justicia distributiva global. Se argumenta que si lo que está en la base de la justicia global es exclusivamente la preocupación por la desigualdad de oportunidades y la pobreza, entonces existen buenas razones a favor de la justicia distributiva global. Sin embargo, aun en este caso deben reconocerse restricciones importantes a la discrecionalidad estatal en temas de inmigración