Building an integrated issue management process as a source of sustainable competitive advantage

This paper defines the key values, principal participants and operational requirements that characterise a strategically relevant global issue management process. It is the authors' intention to reveal and provide support for the most important ‘truth’ about this great discipline: ‘Excellence and relevance is determined by the optimal mix of dedicated, focused and highly imaginative people with processes that unleash their remarkable innovative potential. You need both.’ Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

The hierarchy of military death

The Israeli government's hesitation during the Second Lebanon War (2006) and before the 2009 Gaza War to launch widespread ground operations that might result in the loss of the lives of hundreds of Israeli soldiers sparked criticism that the government had become overly sensitive to soldiers' lives. This criticism contended that the government considered the soldiers' lives more valuable than the lives of civilians. How can this inversion be explained? I argue that the political reality differs from the normative one, ranking soldiers rather than citizens higher on the hierarchy of risk. The hierarchy of risk on which the state positions its citizens and soldiers results from the encounter between two variables: the degree of choice available to those whom the state designates for possible death, and the political cost resulting from the choice, especially when the state fails to justify their death. The higher the group's rank in the hierarchy, the more protected it is because the state tries to minimize its exposure to risk. When the state cannot mitigate the tensions inherent between its duties toward groups placed on the highest rungs in the hierarchy, it may use excessive lethality that claims more civilian casualties from its enemy.     

会话合作语用策略在听力对话教学中的应用

会话合作语用策略中包含数量、质量、关系和方式四条准则。听力对话语篇中存在大量遵守或违反会话合作语用策略的句子。听力教师如能给英语专业学生介绍一些有关会话合作语用策略的知识,并对学生碰到的英语对话语篇根据该策略进行归纳和分析,这将能帮助学生熟悉这些策略并使用它们来判断听力对话语篇中的隐含信息,提高听力语用能力。     

Understanding micro-processes of institutionalization: stewardship contracting and national forest management

This paper examines micro-processes of institutionalization, using the case of stewardship contracting within the US Forest Service. Our basic premise is that, until a new policy becomes an everyday practice among local actors, it will not become institutionalized at the macro-scale. We find that micro-processes of institutionalization are driven by a mixture of large-scale institutional dynamics and how frontline decision-makers understand and interpret these dynamics, given the local social and ecological context in which they operate. For example, this paper suggests that a new policy may become institutionalized when it is understood to solve problems that old institutions at once create and demand to be solved. Agency actors cannot be conceptualized as untethered from the institutions in which they operate. Yet, within larger institutional dynamics, field personnel make key choices about whether to adopt a new policy, making them important players in the micro-processes of policy institutionalization. The interplay of actors and institutions turns agencies, such as the Forest Service, into complex systems that cannot be understood as artifacts of their own history or as a sum of the decisions of individual actors. This dynamic also implies that macro-level institutional change will be uneven, incomplete, and gradual, mirroring uneven, contingent micro-level processes.     

The economic value of military connections in Turkey

Can financial connections to the military provide economic value in democratic environments? We address this question by studying whether firms in which the Turkish military had a controlling financial interest earned abnormally high stock returns on the Istanbul stock exchange. Our findings from event studies are that this is indeed the case. We infer that militaries can retain substantial power to influence economic policy from behind the scenes even after formally transferring it to democratically elected leaders. The paper contributes to the literature in public choice by demonstrating econometrically that the military can be a major rent seeking actor even in democratic environments.     

The changing character of national borders

At the end of the twentieth century, the pace of change in the international system is increasing. New actors and even new categories of actors are emerging. Some have a strong impact on international relations, thus competing with the traditional type of international actor, the sovereign nation‐state. One salient feature of the nation‐state is its power to control its borders. In the process of globalization, this power is being disintegrated.

In some respects, national borders have completely lost their relevance, owing to certain adverse ecological developments like the degradation of the ozone layer and other virtually global threats. They are equally of limited use in influencing the speed and content of some trade operations concerning goods or currencies or the free flow of media information.

They however continue to function in a rather efficient way for people. Immigration laws and certain other procedures of the ‘rich’ countries tend to distinguish between wanted and unwanted immigrants. Due to various catastrophies and disasters, wide‐spread violence and the anticipation of a bleak economic future, the number of migrants continues to grow rapidly, as does the pressure from migrants from the ‘poor’ and densely populated countries of the world on the borders of the ‘rich’ countries. This is a multi‐dimensional development with political, economic, but also moral aspects.