Instituted or Embedded? Legal, Fiscal and Economic Institutionalisation of Markets

Recent debates in economic sociology have raised questions about the significance of law in the economy, and specifically the role of law in the operation of markets. This paper compares a recent grand and detailed historical sweeps of the laws of the labour market by Deakin and Wilkinson with an ideally complementing similar two volume study of the history of taxation, also related to the labour market, by Daunton. By exploring the differences between the evolution of legal, fiscal and welfare institutions, this paper aims to cast light on the processes of institutional change that neither, taken separately, were able to undertake

Drinking-Water and drinking water: Trajectories of Provision and Consumption in the UK, Taiwan and Delhi

In many advanced economies, water is one of the most taken-for-granted and ?ordinary? objects of consumption. However, the emergence of all-purpose (including drinking) water was the outcome of long and varied historical processes, involving major changes in both systems of provision and patterns of consumption. In many parts of the world, there are still different types and sources of water for different consumption purposes, and there are significant inequalities in rights over this most basic resource, especially water fit for drinking. Water presents a critical lens to explore organisations of economies of a good, which are often a complex mix of private, commercial, or public systems of provision. This paper will argue that an ?instituted economic process? approach is fruitful in exploring diverse configurations of production, appropriation, distribution and consumption of water. In particular, it will argue that practices of consumption are best analysed as integral and necessary dimensions of these wider configurations of economic organisation. The analysis will draw on my current comparative research in the UK, Delhi and Taiwan, and empirically demonstrates the need to problematise water as a consumption good, in order to understand its rich and complex diversity. This research arose from my comparative research on bottled water, undertaken in the wider research programme of the ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group

Seeing Me in the Story: Representation of Multiracial Characters in Multimedia

In 2015, I discovered Saga, a graphic novel series that chronicles a science fiction story of war, family, and forbidden love. This series resonated with me because it is the first piece of pop culture that I invested in with a leading character whose racial identity is similar to my own. I discovered three multiracial characters in different forms of media set within the United States: Lincoln Clay from the videogame Mafia III, Lara Jean Covey from the movie To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Miles Morales from Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man. As both a student affairs professional and a multiracial individual, I use current literature on the multiracial experience in the United States and multiracial identity development theories from my field as a lens to analyze these characters and how I see aspects of my identity in their stories

Marx's Economy and Beyond

Following renewed interest in Marx?s political economy in the wake of the financial crisis, the paper aims to make a contribution to debates re-evaluating Marx?s theory of capitalism and his conceptualisation of the relationship between the polity and economy. We bring together our approaches from political philosophy, economic sociology, and political economy, making the case for a renewal of historical materialism. We develop a perspective of a radically politicised economy, rather than treating polity and economy as separate spheres. The political implications of this perspective involve an insistence on political and economic democratisation and human rights as an integral part of any socially egalitarian alternatives to capitalist political economies. The paper, written without the full academic paraphernalia, engages with current defences of the classical Marxist understanding of exploitation, especially the labour theory of value, and presents an alternative, neo-Polanyian analysi

Political Shaping Of Transitions To Biofuels In Europe, Brazil And The USA

Faced with major challenges of global climate change, declining fossil fuel reserves, and competition between alternative uses of land, the transition to renewable transport fuels has been marked by new modes of political economic governance and the strategic direction of innovation. In this paper, we compare the different trajectories to the development and uptake of biofuels in Europe, Brazil and the USA. In terms of the timing, direction, and development of biofuels for road transport, the early lead taken by Brazil in sugarcane based ethanol and flex-fuel cars, the USA drive to corn-to-ethanol, and the European domination of biodiesel from rapeseed, manifest significant contrasts at many levels. Adopting a neo-Polanyian ?instituted economic process? approach we argue that the contrasting trajectories exemplify the different modes of politically instituting markets. We analyse the contrasting weight and impact of different drivers in each case (energy security, climate change mitigation, rural economy development, and market opportunity) in the context of diverse initial conditions and resource endowments. We explore the ?politics of markets? that arise from the different modes of instituting markets for ecologically sustainable economic growth, including the role of NGOs, the scientific controversies over land-use change, and the contrasting political institutions in our case studies. We also place our analysis in the historical perspective of other major carbon energy transitions (charcoal to coal, coal to petrochemicals). In so doing, we explore the idea of the emergence of new modes of governance of contemporary capitalist political economies, and the significance of politically directed innovation. The research is based on an extensive primary research programme of in-depth interviews with strategic players in each of the geographic regions, qualitative institutional analysis, a scenario workshop, and secondary data analysis

Public or private economies of knowledge: The economics of diffusion and appropriation of bioinformatics tools

The past three decades have witnessed a period of great turbulence in the economies of biological knowledge, during which there has been great uncertainty as to how and where boundaries could be drawn between public or private knowledge especially with regard to the explosive growth in biological databases and their related bioinformatic tools. This paper will focus on some of the key software tools developed in relation to bio-databases. It will argue that bioinformatic tools are particularly economically unstable, and that there is a continuing tension and competition between their public and private modes of production, appropriation, distribution, and use. The paper adopts an ?instituted economic process? approach, and in this paper will elaborate on processes of making knowledge public in the creation of ?public goods?. The question is one of continuously creating and sustaining new institutions of the commons. We believe this critical to an understanding of the division and interdependency between public and private economies of knowledge

Ranking social bookmarks using topic models

Ranking of resources in social tagging systems is a difficult problem due to the inherent sparsity of the data and the vo- cabulary problems introduced by having a completely unre- stricted lexicon. In this paper we propose to use hidden topic models as a principled way of reducing the dimensionality of this data to provide more accurate resource rankings with higher recall. We first describe Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and then show how it can be used to rank resources in a social bookmarking system. We test the LDA tagging model and compare it with 3 non-topic model baselines on a large data sample obtained from the Delicious social book- marking site. Our evaluations show that our LDA-based method significantly outperforms all of the baselines

AGRICULTURAL LAND PROTECTION POLICY FOR ALBANIA: LESSONS FROM WESTERN EUROPE, NORTH AMERICA, AND JAPAN

This report has been prepared as one effort to assist the Albanian government in formulating a policy approach appropriate to the conditions and culture of their country. The goal of this report is to examine the approach to agricultural land protection in other parts of the world, for the lessons they can provide to Albania. There is little recent literature on the subject of agricultural land protection policies. Most of the articles found in the English-language literature are six to ten years old, and in turn often rely on other sources that are several years older still. Thus, this survey should be viewed as a somewhat dated catalog of policy approaches which have been used at various times in the respective jurisdictions rather than as a statement of the current policy structure of a particular jurisdiction.Land use, Rural--Government policy--Europe, Land use, Rural--Government policy--Canada, Land use, Rural--Government policy--United States, Land use, Rural--Government policy--Japan, Land use, Rural--Law and legislation, Agriculture and state--Albania, Agricultural planning--Albania, Land Economics/Use,